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

IOMeter Sequential & Random 4KB Performance

IOMeter Sequential Performance

Legit Reviews is once again adding IOMeter v1.1.0 testing to ourSolid-State Drive reviews as we feel that the canned benchmarks no longer show enough of the performance picture nor do they expose many of the heat issues that we are starting to encounter on M.2 PCIe SSDs and sustained write issues on TLC NAND based drives. We start out testing each drive with IOMeter, but first we prepare the drive. This is done by using Parted Magic to complete a full Secure Erase each and every drive. Next we use IOMeter to prefill the drive by performing the industry standard 128KB, aligned, sequential write workload across the entire drive for a period of 30 minutes. Once the drive is conditioned we run our saved sequential test profile that runs our 128KB test for one minute without any idle time in between the tests. The queue depth is set to 32 as we feel with NVMe drives starting to come out that we need to increase our IO depth.

The 128KB Sequential Read/Write test is done primarily to make sure the drives we are testing meet or surpass the manufacturer specifications for sequential Read/Write performance. The Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB drive topped out at 3,335.1 MB/s read and 1,575.5 MB/s write and this is above the rated specs of 3,200 MB/s, but slightly below the rated write speed of 1,900MB/s. This is because the drives cache filled up during our minute long write test and it hurt the performance for the write and mixed workload test that we do.

IOMeter 4KB Random Performance

Our 4KB random performance test is conducted in the same manner as our sequential tests, but once the drive is conditioned we run our saved random test profile that runs our 4KB test for two minutes without any idle time in between the tests. The queue depth is set to 32 on four workers and the test is begun. To get the benefits from NVMe based drives you must use multiple CPU queues and this is why we are now using four workers for this IOMeter test.

We also do 4K Random testing with IOMeter to make sure the drives we are testing meet or surpass the manufacturer specifications for sequential Read/Write performance. The Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB drive topped out at 352,652 IOPS on the 4KB Random Read test when it is rated for 380,000 IOPS. The 4KB Random Write test hit 298,995 IOPS when the drive is rated for 360,000 IOPS. We were off the drives rated marks by a fair bit, but it is just due to the fact that we test for 1 minute instead of 1 second. At one second we get 367,000 IOPS on the 4K random read, but only 299,000 when running the test for a minute. The scores here are greatly dependent on how long you benchmark the drive for.