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

ATTO & CrystalDiskMark

ATTO v3.05

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5KB through 64MB transfer sizes with the total length being 256MB.

ATTO – Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB:

ATTO – Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB:

ATTO – Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB:

Benchmark Results: ATTO showed the Samsung SSD 960 Pro 2TB M.2 NVMe drive topped out at 3,460 MB/s read and 2,1309 MB/s write in the standard overlapped I/O benchmark. These are the highest speeds we have seen from any consumer SSD or HDD.

Benchmark Results: Here is how the new Samsung SSD 960 EVO series drives compare to several generations of Samsung M.2 SSDs along with the WD Blue SATA III 1TB SSD to show how far ahead the M.2 PCIe drives with regards to sequential performance.

CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CystalDiskmark – Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB:

CystalDiskmark – Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB:

CystalDiskmark – Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB:

Benchmark Results: The Samsung SSD 960 Pro 2TB drive reached 2,610 MB/s read and 2,136 MB/s write in the standard sequential write test and Random 4K performance was 58 MB/s read and 206 MB/s write. Here we see the Samsung SSD 960 EVO coming in at 2,345 MB/s read and 1,942 MB/s write with Random 4K performance of 52 MB/s read and 245 MB/s write. Not bad performance at all. Samsung rates this particular 1TB model at up to 3,200 MB/s read and 1,900 MB/s write when it comes to sequential performance and we were able to surpass those marks in our Q32T1 testing. When we ran the test again set to 0Fill mode and all the scores remained basically the same, but the sequential performance did improve a bit more than we expected. The Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB drive was slightly slower, but we expected that as it has lower sequential and random performance.

Let’s look at some other benchmarks!