With the reviews of the new Microsoft Surface Go landing one thing is obvious: everyone is looking at the more expensive $550 version with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage as the one to buy versus the $399 option with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of space. Part of that is just the expectation of 8GB of RAM is better especially if using something like the Chrome browser. But the real concern is the type of storage used – eMMC – which is expected to be significantly slower than SSD found in the more expensive model. If you don't know the difference, we wrote an excellent primer on how the two storage formats compare. But what about real-world benchmarks? We just picked up the $399 option to give that old eMMC memory a first look and here is what we found and how it compares to a few other Surface models: Best VPN providers 2020: Learn about ExpressVPN, NordVPN & more Surface Go (128 SSD) vs Surface Go (64 eMMC) CrystalDiskMark (higher is better)

Device Read Write Surface Go (eMMC) 260 MB/s 145 MB/s Surface Go (SSD) 1,185 MB/s 133 MB/s Surface 3 (eMMC) 149 MB/s 33 MB/s Dell XPS Tower (HDD) 133 MB/s 150 MB/s Surface Laptop 648 MB/s 244 MB/s Surface Pro 4 758 MB/s 159 MB/s Surface Pro 2017 847MB/s 801 MB/s Surface Book 1,018 MB/s 967 MB/s Surface Pro 2017 1,284 MB/s 963 MB/s Surface Book 2 1,411 MB/s 1,202 MB/s

For the test, I left the Surface Go in S-mode and the OS updated to build 17134.191 although those unlikely have any effect on CrystalDiskMark anyway. As you can see, there is a rather significant drop in disk read performance between the 128GB model's SSD (1,185MB/s) and the eMMC found in the 64GB model (260MB/s) as expected. Still, compared to the Surface 3's slow eMMC (149MB/s) the Surface Go is a step up – just not nearly as dramatic as the 128GB model, which has roughly 10x the performance.