Samsung SM951 NVMe 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 NVMe 256GB:

Benchmark Results: The overall Anvil SSD Benchmark score with the Applications benchmark was 5,668.33 on the Samsung SM951 NVMe 256GB M.2 PCIe SSD with 100% compression. This score is about half of what we expected as again we ran into write performance issues on this benchmark.

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 1701MB/s and a write speed of 1230MB/s according to this utility. The HD Tune 4K Random Multi test with a QD of 32 showed that the drive had 145,000 IOPS read and 5,300 IOPS write.

Benchmark Results: The sequential read benchmark averaged 1356 MB/s and the sequential write benchmark averaged 1153 MB/s.