Kingston SM2280S3 120GB M.2 SATA SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark & Anvil IOPS

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 – Intel Z97 Platform

Benchmark Results: As with the AS-SSD benchmark, we find the write scores to have dropped off some but still solid performance overall. The 4k numbers are good here as well.

Anvil Storage Utilities that is a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be user customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 32. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

Benchmark Results: Surprisingly, the read IOPS results we saw were a little under the 66,000 specification but the writes were roughly 11,000 points higher than what is expected from the spec sheet.