AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light (Data Rate)

The 4TB 850 EVO is in a four-way tie for highest average data rate, and the Samsung drives in general score very well and quite close to the SATA interface limits.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light (Latency)

The 4TB 850 EVO's average service time is not top notch, but is still reasonable for a high-end SATA drive.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light (Latency)

Once again the latency of the 4TB isn't the best and isn't quite as good as the 1TB and 2TB counterparts, but it's still better than all the other TLC drives.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light (Power)

The power usage of the 4TB EVO is a bit worse than the 2TB model when fresh but is slightly better for a full drive, showing that this drive isn't worth having if you're barely going to use it.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy Random Performance
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  • Enigmatica - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link

    Silh is right. My DAW system has 64GB of RAM and all of my samples are stored on a 400GB Intel PCIe NVME drive. I'm only a hobbyist but my set of samples is well into the 200GB range. Pros with all of the gear can easily break 1+ TB
  • ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link

    Pros are actually invested in making music than obsessing with sample hoarding ;)

    NI KOMPLETE is 100 GB and it has pretty much everything you are ever going to need. Naturally, that means actual analog instruments. A lot of mediocre pseudo musicians obsess on hoarding what is not instrument samples but ready to use loops they can play and imagine they are doing music. The format of distribution of that stuff is as stupid as it is itself - since it is not really live performance and usually synthesized sound, it could just as well be distributed as midi + synthesizer presets, and take kilobytes rather than gigabytes - a million times less space...
  • smilingcrow - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link

    Classic “I know what’s best for everybody” rant by someone that fails to understand the topic they are discussing.
  • DPUser - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link

    Smilingcrow is right on point here. While ddriver's words may accurately convey the mindset of a certain subset of "musicians" using computers, VI orchestrators and pro producers in many genres are not just using loops; describing these writers, arrangers, performers and engineers as "pseudo musicians" indicates a complete lack comprehension as to how these extremely talented folks work.

    And while is NI Komplete is wonderful, it is not (yet, if ever) the be all and end all. Incredible VIs are being developed every day by other developers, bringing new levels of fidelity and expression, making greater demands on system real-time performance and soaking up ever-increasing swaths of storage space.
  • Silh - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link

    Have a look at some of the professional orchestral libraries. These are not loops, or instrument runs, but individual note samples, recorded with multiple articulations, velocity layers, different mic positions, etc. You're looking at at 300GB+ for, say, just the strings. VSL's full orchestra comes in about 1TB if you put everything together (and priced waaaaaaaay out of what I can afford).
  • Daniel Egger - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link

    RAW Photo editing is harmless: you import all data once and from then on it's mostly reading data. Even if you're a pro you'll have a hard time filling 4x64GB cards a day and you certainly won't sustain that throughout a year. So even if you believed in that segment-my-ass 300TB endurance figure you'll be using it for 3 or 4 years...
  • ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link

    Sure, editing involves mostly reading, you edit the photos then throw away the changes. But even then, photoshop will generate tens of gigabytes of temporary scratch files ;)
  • smilingcrow - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link

    A prosumer would be using a separate scratch disk with Photoshop though if they wanted top performance.
  • Impulses - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link

    Cheap(er) SATA drives for RAWs here (2x1TB EVO atm), SM951 for the apps and their libraries/scratch.
  • mapesdhs - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link

    Keep posting your sensible example config, I like that. 8)

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