Samsung SSD 860 Pro Review: Fast, Reliable SATA Solid State Storage

Name: Samsung SSD 860 Pro
Brand: Samsung

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, January 23, 2018, 10:00 AM EDT

Samsung SSD 860 Pro - Setup, IOMeter, Compression Testing

Page 2: Samsung SSD 860 Pro - 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.

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

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 PRO drive led the pack across the board here. Regardless of the queue depth or access pattern used, the Samsung SSD 860 PRO came out in front.

The transfer rates during the high queue depth runs mirror what we saw in terms of IOPS. The Samsung SSD 860 PRO offered the most bandwidth and leads the pack.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark

Bring Your Translator: http://bit.ly/aRx11n

Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark 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.

Though there is a bit of a slope in our results (and the benchmark itself shows some small peaks and valleys throughout), the compressibility of data being transferred on these drives has little to no impact on performance. And once again, the SSD 860 PRO is at, or near, the top of the charts.