Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD Review (512GB) – New Ultra Standard Exceeds 140K PCMark Vantage Score

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL (BETA)

You may not see this for long (and it’s 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 use in our benchmark testing.

As much ASU provided some great throughput and IOPS results, this is the first time we could get an example of what the Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD could do with respect to disk access times (Resp. Time) and its speed here is very impressive, no doubt making a large contribution to the final Total Point Score.

PCMARK VANTAGE X64 HDD SUITE

The SSD Review uses benchmark software called PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite to create testing scenarios that might be used in the typical user experience. There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests are complete. The simulations are as follows:

• Windows Defender In Use
• Streaming Data from storage in games such as Alan Wake which allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action
• Importing digital photos into Windows Photo Gallery
• Starting the Vista Operating System
• Home Video editing with Movie Maker which can be very time consuming
• Media Center which can handle video recording, time shifting and streaming from Windows media center to an extender such as XBox
• Cataloging a music library
• Starting applications

SAMSUNG XP941 M.2 PCIE SSD VANTAGE RESULTS

Samsung’s XP941 provided one of the best results we have ever seen in PCMark Vantage Testing with a Total Point Score of 119053.  Not only did every result easily surpass the former bottleneck known as SATA 3, but also, the top transfer speed reached was that of 847MB/s while working in Media Center.

Even more impressive was the result we saw in Vantage when the system was optimized, bumping the Total Score to 140455 and a top transfer speed of 947MB/s:

When comparing to any SATA 3 SSD, there really is no comparison for us to demonstrate just how much faster the Samsung M.2 PCIe SSD is compared to the competition.  Just as an example, we have provided Vantage results of the fastest similar form factor SSDs tested to date.  Don’t let the fact that we have left out notebook SSDs from this chart influence you; the XP941 blows all of them away as well.