Samsung SSD 860 EVO M.2 SATA Review: Fast, Affordable Solid State Storage
Samsung SSD 860 EVO - Setup, IOMeter, Compression Testing
Our Test Methodologies: 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.
The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with our ATTO, PCMark, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing and Windows 10 Quiet Hours were enabled. 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. We should note, these tests were run on a system without the latest patches for the Spectre and Meltdown security issues. Applying those patches has shown to affect storage performance.
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Processor - Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Storage - |
Intel Core i7-8700K Gigabyte Z370 Ultra Gaming (Z370 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) Intel HD 630 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-2666 Integrated on board Corsair Force GT (OS Drive) Intel SSD 545s Crucial BX300 WD Blue 3D Toshiba TR200 Series Samsung SSD 860 PRO Samsung SSD 860 EVO |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Benchmarks - |
Windows 10 Pro x64 Intel 10.1.1.44, iRST 15.8.1.1007 DirectX 12 IOMeter 1.1 HD Tune v5.70 ATTO v3.05 AS SSD CrystalDiskMark v5.2.2 x64 PCMark Storage Bench 2.0 SiSoftware SANDRA |
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In the following graphs, we're showing two sets of access patterns; acustom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 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.
![io1](https://hothardware.com/ContentImages/Article/2713/content/io1.png)
![io2](https://hothardware.com/ContentImages/Article/2713/content/io2.png)
The Samsung SSD 860 EVO performs almost identically to the higher-end SSD 860 Pro. The lines overlap straight across both access patterns and workloads for the two drives, which lead the pack overall.
![io3](https://hothardware.com/ContentImages/Article/2713/content/io3.png)
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![as1](https://hothardware.com/ContentImages/Article/2713/content/as1.png)
![as2](https://hothardware.com/ContentImages/Article/2713/content/as2.png)