Samsung SSD 960 EVO Review – 250GB and 1TB NVMe M.2 Drives Tested

Anvil Storage Utilities

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 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.

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

Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB drive scored 14,424 points with Samsung NVMe Driver version 2.0. The Samsung SSD 960 EVO 150GB drive scored slightly less with 13,003 as the overall score.

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 on both drives.

Benchmark Results: We used Anvil to check the 4K QD32 Random Read performance and found we we topped out at 453,300 IOPS. The Samsung 960 Pro 2TB performs very close to that of the Samsung 950 Pro 512GB drive that we looked at last year up until about a QD of 8 and then the 960 Pro takes off. The Samsung XP941 PCIe drive doesn’t support NVMe and you can see how that AHCI drive had much lower IOPS at each QD.

Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K Random Write performance we were shocked to find that the Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB drive performed better than the Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB drive across the board. We even went back and updated the Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB numbers with the Samsung NVMe Driver v2.0 and this is as good as it got! The Samsung SSD 960 PRO had impressive numbers for a 250GB drive that costs just $129!