Samsung SM951 M.2 PCIe SSD Review (512GB)

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 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.

Similar to the results we got with the Intel 750, Crystal Disk Mark shows a bit lower sequential speeds. Read maxes out at 1,760MB/s and writes reach 1,586MB/s. 4K QD1 read and write speeds are similar to other high-end SATA SSDs reaching 50MB/s read and 163MB/s write.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.7

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.

While not the highest score ever achieved by a single SSD, the Samsung SM951 reached an impressive overall score of 2007. Both read and write speeds follow Crystal Disk Mark as they are a bit lower than ATTO’s results. Reads max out at 1,965MB/s and writes hit 1,508MB/s. In terms of IOPS we can see it is able to hit well over the 90K rating to 175K for read and85K write!

This AS SSD Copy Bench test is a true to life evaluation of performance as AS SSD creates three files (ISO/Program/Game), and simply moves them from one part of the SSD to another, recording their top speed and total transfer time. The best speed of 1,502MB/s was achieved via the ISO test which shows full performance saturation on the write side of the transfer, which is very nice to see.

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.

While providing us another look at performance, Anvil Storage Utilities shows overall, they are similar to that of our other tests. An overall score of 9,487 was achieved, which simply triumphs that of the previous XP941’s score. Let’s move on to Iometer and see what we get.

IOMETER

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation, however, they discontinued work on the program. In 2003 it was re-launched by an international group of individuals who are now continuously improving, porting and extend the product that is now widely used within the industry. This is a very powerful benchmarking tool and we are just now starting to integrate it into our consumer reviews. At this point in time we are going to be running a 4KB random workload at QD32 for 30 seconds and show the average to measure performance.

Here we can see that the SM951 was able to maintain a high of 180K IOPS for read and for about 23 seconds maintain just over 100K IOPS for write. However, once the test continues you can see that it hits steady state write performance fairly quickly.

After about 30 seconds the write IOPS performance drops to around 10K IOPS and holds steady throughout the 10 minutes of testing. So, as long as you aren’t doing much high QD writes to the SSD, you should be set when it comes to performance. 180K read IOPS at QD32 is very nice, but so is the 12K QD1 IOPS performance. Let’s move on to some real world application benchmarks and see how it performs.