Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB & 1TB Drives Tested

Next we ran SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

SiSoft SANDRA 2012 Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

According to SiSoft SANDRA's physical disk benchmark, the two Samsung SSD 840 EVO series drives we tested were faster than any competing drive.  We should also point out that we tested the drives with RAPID enabled here as well and saw write transfer speeds in the 500MB to 4GB per second range--yes, that's supposed to be GB there. We didn't see any increase in read performance, however.

ATTO Disk Benchmark More Information Here: http://bit.ly/btuV6w

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

The Samsung SSD 840 EVO series of drives once again offered class-leading performance according to the ATTO disk benchmark. Regardless of the transfer size, the EVO drives finished at, or at least very near, the top of the heap.

Enabling RAPID mode resulted in performance that was all over the map, depending on the transfer size and scope of the benchmark. Here's what ATTO reported for the 1TB drive using ATTO's default settings.