Samsung 470 Series 256GB SSD Review

HD Tach & CrystalDiskMark Synthetic Benches

HD TACH 3.0.4.0

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device as possible.

Benchmark Results: A very clean and smooth graph indicates consistent performance but this is the first benchmark to show read scores falling below rated specifications. That’s not unusual for this benchmark though. Writes did exceed the specification and overall performance was excellent.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.0h

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.

Benchmark Results: We see a lot of drives begin to struggle here because CrystalDiskMark uses incompressible data. The 470 Series chugged right along here exceeding rated specifications for both reads and writes while posting some of the best scores of any SATA II based drive – especially in the sequential writes.