Samsung SSD 850 Pro (128GB, 256GB & 1TB) Review: Enter the 3D Era
by Kristian Vättö on July 1, 2014 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based - we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we are testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used |
| Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox |
| Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Starcraft 2, BioShock Infinite |
| Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox |
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware |
| Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 |
| Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 |
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we have been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
Thanks to the excellent IO consistency, the 850 Pro dominates our 2013 Storage Bench. At the 1TB capacity point, the 850 Pro is over 15% faster than any drive when looking at the average data rate. That is huge because the 850 Pro has less over-provisioning than most of today's high-end drives and the 2013 Storage Bench tends to reward drives that have more over-provisioning because it essentially pushes drives to steady-state. The 256GB model does not do as well as the 1TB one but it is still one of the fastest drives in its class. I wonder if the lesser amount of over-provisioning is the reason or perhaps the Extreme Pro is just so well optimized for mixed workloads.
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MrSpadge - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
No, it's really "600 MB/s whatever". In reality about 550 MB/s seems to be the maximum. With 300r + 300w full duplex neither read nor write could surpass 300 MB/s.zmeul - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
why I ask thisI see a lot op people putting SSDs in RAID0, and I wonder why ... to me, it seems totally pointless
the system doesn't do only writes or only reads, so what's the point? well, except in the cases where you copy/move some huge files from one matrix to another
Cerb - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Copying large files, and loading large files. Realistically, you can copy from a new SSD to another at anywhere from 250MBps to 450MBps (including OS/filesystem overhead). That's halved, or worse, copying from an SSD to itself. RAID 0 gives you an approximately linear bandwidth increase. If you don't need a logical or physical separation of data locations, RAID 0 beats a separate drive.When I'm backing up my Bethesda games directory, I wish I had more speed, as it could be done faster in a RAID. However, I only do that one or two times per month (all my saves for all my games are on automatic backup).
For typical light random IO, it very much is pointless.
457R4LDR34DKN07 - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link
Easy, say you have 2 sata 2.0 SSD but want sata 3.0 speeds.Kevin G - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
Typo?"I bet many of you would have liked to see the 850 Pro move to the PCIe interface but I understand Samsung's decision to hold on with PCIe for a little while longer."
I think the second PCIe should be SATA.
stickmansam - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
of the "on" could be a "off'Solid State Brain - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
How many P/E cycles does the NAND on this drive support, by SMART data?Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
I will test that as soon as I get back from Korea, as well as send you the Extreme Pro data. Sorry for not replying to your email earlier, I kind of lost focus on everything else when I started working on this review :)Solid State Brain - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
No problem, thanks!extide - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link
You should actually put up a little pipeline article with all of this data, because it would be interesting to me, and I am sure lots of other users as well.