Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SATA SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Anvil Storage Utilities & AIDA64

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0

Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 1, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because 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.

Anvil SSD Benchmark with 100% Compression (incompressible data):

Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB SATA drive was able to achieve a score of 5,485.42 points with 529 MB/s read and 500 MB/s write speeds when it comes to the measured sequential performance with 4MB file sizes.

Anvil SSD Applications Benchmark at 46% Compression:

Benchmark Results: With the compression at 46% to help mimic real world applications better we found the overall score dropped slightly down to 5,481.18 points.

Benchmark Results: We used Anvil to check the 4K Random Read performance and found we topped out at 96,600 IOPS using the 46% compression preset that best matches typical applications. The Samsung SSD 860 PRO is rated as having a maximum 4K Random Read IOPS of up to 98K at QD32 and we are very close to that! The QD1 to QD4 performance numbers are about as good as you can get from a SATA III SSD!

Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K Random Write performance, the Samsung 860 PRO 2TB drive topped out at 87,800 IOPS at QD8 and hit 86,700 IOPS at QD32. That is just below the drives rated 90k IOPS for maximum 4K Random Write QD32 performance.