Samsung 950 Pro M.2 512GB NVMe review
3. AS SSD benchmark
We move on with the AS SSD benchmark, which contains five synthetic as well as three practical tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and the random read / write performance of an SSD. These tests are carried out without using the operating system's cache. The Seq-test measures how long it takes to read and write an 1GB file. Most importantly, this sequential benchmark uses incompressible data for all of its transfers.
The 4K benchmark tests the read and write performance for random 4K blocks. The 4K-64-THRD-test corresponds to the 4K procedure except that here the read and write operations are distributed on 64 threads:
Checking out the Copy Benchmark below, it is pretty remarkable that, in both tests, the ISO file was transferred in just 0.66 seconds!
The 950 PRO's performance in sequential reading with incompressible test was the highest we have observed from an SSD so far, at 2133 MB/s. The same applies for sequential writing, where the drive wrote the incompressible files at 1424 MB/s (average).
At the 4K random reading tests, the Samsung 950 Pro SSD reached the top of the chart below, with an average reading speed of 51.29 MB/s.
The 950 drive was again very fast at the 4K random writing tests, giving 154.2MB/s:
Multi-threaded requests for random reading of 4K incompressible files were not an issue for the Samsung 950 Pro512GB SSD, ranking first in both the read and write tests: