We really like PCMark 7's Secondary Storage benchmark module for its pseudo real-world application measurement approach to testing. PCMark 7 offers a trace-based measurement of system response times under various scripted workloads of traditional client / desktop system operation. From simple application start-up performance, to data streaming from a drive in a game engine, and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we feel more comfortable that these tests reasonably illustrate the performance profile of SSDs in an end-user / consumer PC usage model, more so than a purely synthetic transfer test.
The Samsung SSD 960 EVO 500GB performed well in the PCMark Storage benchmark, but trailed the other NVMe-based drives by a few percentage points. If you drill into the individual test results, it is only the "Starting Applications" test that pulled down the overall score.
