Samsung 960 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD Review (2TB) – Breathtaking Speed

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 4.0.3 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.

Crystal Disk Mark also shows similar sequential results. Read reaches nearly 3.5GB/s and write speed performance is almost 2.2GB/s. 4K performance is extremely good. It reaches 63MB/s read and almost 300MB/s write at QD1! During the 4K QD32T4 test the 960 Pro is at a QD of 128 and reaches 1870MB/s read and 1478MB/s write, which is insane!

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.8

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. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

In AS SSD the 960 Pro reached and overall score of 4527 points, which simply blows away the competition. It is a whole 700 points higher than that of the Intel 750 1.2TB even! As normal sequential read and write speeds are a slightly slower than in the other benchmarks. Sequential read comes in at 2.7GB/s, but write performance is still very strong at 2075MB/s. 4K read is very good in AS SSD too. It reads at 54MB/s and writes at over 200MB/s at QD1. During the threaded 4K test it reached nearly 420K/300K read/write IOPS, just shy of the 440K/330K rating, but amazing none the less.

All copy benchmark results were top ranking. The ISO result was 1967MB/s, or just half a second duration, the Program speed was 887MB/s or 1.59 seconds, and the Game benchmark was 1559MB/s or just 0.89 seconds. All of these are incredibly fast, faster than any other drive we have tested.

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.

Finally, the 960 Pro does it yet again. It delivers a record breaking score of 15968 points in Anvil. Sequential and random speeds follow that of AS SSD. Here we can see that it was able to reach 350K IOPS on writes however. Let’s take a look at some real-world type benchmarks with PCMark on the next page.