Samsung XP941 256GB M.2 PCIe SSD Mini Review

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:

Benchmark Results: The overall Anvil SSD Benchmark score for the Samsung XP941 256GB M.2 PCIe SSD is 3,448.57.

Queue Depth 4:

Benchmark Results: The Samsung XP941 256 GB M.2 SSD IOPS performance was hitting ~24,000 IOPS read and ~39,400 IOPS write on the random 4K IOPS test with a Queue Depth o4.

Queue Depth 16:

Benchmark Results: The Samsung XP941 256 GB M.2 SSD IOPS performance was hitting ~58,100 IOPS read and ~52,700 IOPS write on the random 4K IOPS test with a Queue Depth of 16.