Our Test Methods: Under each test condition, the SSDs tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and AHCI mode was enabled for the host drive. The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing (when applicable), and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with the ATTO and CrystalDiskMark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing and Windows 10 Quiet Hours / Focus Assist was enabled to prevent any potential interruptions.
In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test. All of the drives featured here were tested with their own
NVMe drivers installed where possible / available, but the default Windows 10 NVMe driver was used when a proprietary driver was unavailable. Also note, we have completely revamped our test bed, so the numbers shown in this review aren’t comparable to previous articles. All of the drives here have also been updated to their latest firmware and drivers where applicable.
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| HotHardware Test System |
| Intel Core i9 Powered |
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Processor -
Motherboard -
Video Card -
Memory -
Audio -
Storage -
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Intel Core i9-9900K
Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master
(Z390 Chipset, AHCI Enabled)
Intel HD 630
16GB G.SKILL DDR4-2666
Integrated on board
Corsair Force GT (OS Drive)
Samsung SSD 883 DCT (960GB)
Samsung SSD 883 DCT (1.92TB)
Samsung SSD 883 DCT (3.84TB)
Kingston DC500R (3.84TB)
Kingston DC500M (3.84TB)
Intel SSD DC4510 (2TB) |
OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -
Benchmarks - |
Windows 10 Pro x64 (1809, 17763.475)
Intel 10.1.1.45, iRST 17.2.0.1009
DirectX 12
IOMeter 1.1
HD Tune v5.70
ATTO v4.00.0f2
AS SSD
CrystalDiskMark v6.0.2 x64
SiSoftware SANDRA |
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| IOMeter |
| I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool |
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As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our results with IOMeter appear to scale, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance. The access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workload, for example. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput, latency, and bandwidth with a given storage solution. In addition, there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.
In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; a custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access. Queue depths from 1 to 32 were tested...
We have included an Intel PCIe NVMe enterprise SSD in our data for reference purposes, versus all of the other SATA-based enterprise drives. As you can see, the high-capacity Samsung 883 DCT drives offer somewhat better throughput at the lowest queue depths, but things level out at the higher queue depths due to the limitations of the SATA interface.
The actual bandwidth numbers track the peak IOPS exactly (as they should), and once again show the limits of what SATA can do.
The latency characteristics for all of the SATA drives is relatively similar as well, at least at the higher queue depths. The Kingston DC500 drives offered somewhat higher latency at QD1, but above that the SATA drives were tightly grouped.
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| AS SSD Compression Benchmark |
| Bring Your Translator: http://bit.ly/aRx11n |
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Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test is interesting because it uses a mix of compressible and non-compressible data and outputs both Read and Write throughput of the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.
The compressibility of the data being transferred across the drives we tested had little to no impact on performance. The SATA drives all finishes right on top of each other as well.
