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CRYSTAL DISK INFO VER. 8.11.2 X64
Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.
The Crystal Disk Info analysis was completed with the E18 sample drive in the Dell laptop. It validates that the system is running in PCIe 4.0 x4 (4 lane) and that the NVMe 1.4 protocol was in use. These tests were also conducted with this SSD as the system drive.
ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.
We can see data transfer highs of 6.59GB/s read and 5.69GB/s write were provided, but we also noticed a drop in performance at the 12MB sample mark. ATTO is one of the most demanding benchmarks and this drop was the result of the SSD heating up significantly.
CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 8.0.1 x64
Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples.
THROUGHPUT
IOPS
Our Crystal DiskMark results were very impressive considering the amount of testing this SSD has seen, as well as the fact that this is the highest performance we have ever seen in a laptop. We did make note, however, that IOPS appeared a bit low.
The toughest benchmark available for solid state drives is AS SSD as it relies solely on incompressible data samples when testing performance. For the most part, AS SSD tests can be considered the ‘worst case scenario’ in obtaining data transfer speeds and many enthusiasts like AS SSD for their needs.
Once again, we were very impressed with the AS SSD results, especially that 105MB/s 4k read data transfer speed. Once again, however, we did notice that IOPS in the laptop seemed a bit low and the cause of this is most likely the mobile CPU in use.
ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL
Anvil’s Storage Utilities (ASU) are the most complete test bed available for the solid state drive today. The benchmark displays test results for, not only throughput but also, IOPS and Disk Access Times. Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and use in our benchmark testing.
