Samsung SSD 860 EVO M.2 SATA Review: Fast, Affordable Solid State Storage

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.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

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

IOMeter I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is 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 actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, 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 for typical consumer workloads. This test is a purely synthetic benchmark with a seemingly limitless configuration options and test methodologies. In other words, the access patterns we tested here may or may not reflect your particular use case. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available bandwidth and IO throughput within 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 many other storage benchmark tools available currently.

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.

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.

The transfer rates for the two Samsung 860 drives are nearly identical as well in our IOMeter tests, as you would expect looking at total IOPS across the various queue depths and access patterns.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark Bring Your Translator: http://bit.ly/aRx11n