Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSD Review – Performance, Value, Battery Life and Untouchable IOPS

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of raw (0/1 Fill/compressible) or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. In the Samsung 840 Pro SSD, performance results are very similar whether we test with compressible or incompressible data and, for this reason, results are displayed utilizing incompressible data.  Of interest to note is how high we could increase performance by optimizing our systems power settings, this result shown on the right.

Prior to these results, I don’t recall ever seeing a high sequential write result of over 500MB/s while testing with incompressible data, incompressible data of course being that of music, movies and photos.  As much as the sequential, 512k, 4k read and 4K-QD32 are just about the best you can get on the result on the left, we would certainly liked to have seen the low 4k random write performance over 100MB/s without having to rely on optimization.  We believe that this performance may translate into amazing PCMark Vantage scoring.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.6

Up until recently, AS SSD was the only benchmark created specifically for SSD testing and it uses incompressible data.  AS SSD, for the most part, gives us the ‘worst case scenario’ in SSD transfer speeds because of its use of incompressible data and many enthusiasts like to AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

Highlights of initial AS SSD testing are very quick disk access times and excellent 4k-64Thrd IOPS very close to specifications, which results in a very high AS SSD Total Score.  To complement this,  the AS SSD Copy Bench is also the highest result we have had to date, marking lightning fast transfer speeds.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL (BETA)

You may not see this for long (and its definitely not common) but you get a freebee simply for reading!  Over the last little while, we have been assisting with beta testing new benchmark software called Anvil Storage Utilities which is an absolutely amazing SSD benchmarking utility.  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 utilize in our benchmark testing.

Some of the lesser- acknowledged qualities of this SSD are evident when we take a look at the response times (or disk access speeds) which are amazing.  IOPS hadn’t reached their top performance yet so we thought we might push the 840 Pro a bit to bring them up. The Total Score of just under 5000 is also front of the pack in all the SSDs we have tested to date.

For a typical form factor SSD (which can definitely be debated with the 840 Pro), reaching 100.000 IOPS at 4k-QD128 and 89,000 IOPS at 4k-QD64 does a great job of displaying the environments in which this SSD could function.