Samsung SM951 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD Review

Anvil Storage Utilities and HD Tune

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0 – Intel X99 Platform

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 4, 16, and 32. 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.

Samsung SM951 512GB:

Benchmark Results: The overall Anvil SSD Benchmark score with the Applications benchmark was 9,324.93 on the Samsung SM951 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD. We also ran Anvil with 100% compression to show how the drive performs with solely incompressible data. The results were a bit better with an overall score of 9,366.95!

HD Tune Pro 5.50

Benchmark Results: We wanted to check out the File Benchmark test in HD Tune Pro, so we fired up HD Tune Pro 5.50 and found that the drive had a sequential read speed of 1736MB/s and a write speed of 1557MB/s according to this utility. The HD Tune 4K Random Multi test with a QD of 32 showed that the drive had 109,000 IOPS read and 64,000 IOPS write.