Samsung SM951 NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD Review

IOMeter Mixed Performance

Our mixed performance test is conducted in the same manner as our sequential tests, but once the drive is conditioned we run our test profile to look at performance in various read/write states. We start the test with 100% reads and then add write data into the mix in 10% increments until we end up with no reads at all in the workload.

The Samsung SM951 NVMe 256GB M.2 drive performance dropped off quickly once writes were added, but stabilized around 700MB/s with a decent mix of read/write operations in our mixed workload test before recovering at 100% writes.

Ideally you want to be below 5ms with regards to the average response time for any given workload and the Samsung SM951 NVMe drive was up above 5ms in the majority of the tests and topped out at 6ms in the 60% read and 40% write test scenario.

When looking at 4KB Random mixed workload performance the Samsung SM951 NVMe drive started out great, but then we saw the performance drop as the number of writes increased.

The average response time started out at 0.4ms with 100% reads and managed to get up to nearly 4ms by the time we were at 100% writes.