Anvil's Storage Utilities:
Anvil's Storage Utilities is another new benchmark designed with SSDs in mind. The standard storage benchmark measures a drive's performance by testing its transfer speeds, access times and IOPS.
Samsung SSD 840 Pro 256GB - RAID 0
Samsung SSD 840 Pro 256GB - RAID 1
Iometer:
Lastly, I ran a series of tests using Iometer. This tool can be configured to benchmark a number of things. In this case, I used it to measure the SSD 840 Pro's read and write speeds and the number of operations per second. The tests were run using random bytes and a queue depth of 3 and then again at a queue depth of 32.
The SSD 840 Pro's sequential read and write performance was very similar to what we saw in our other tests. When configured as a RAID 0 array, the two drives were able to read at 1019.09 MB/s and write at 894.88 MB/s. They were also able to read at a respectable 974.08 MB/s when in RAID 1. However, the write speed dropped to 444.81 MB/s, which is slower than what we saw with a single SSD 840 Pro.
At low queue depths, RAID didn't do much to boost the SSD 840 Pro's random read and write performance. The only real notable improvement was when doing random writes using RAID 0. At higher queue depths, it was a totally different story. When configured as a RAID 0 array, the two drives were able to write at 735.87 MB/s and read at a blazing 692.89 MB/s.
At high queue depths, the number of IOPS a pair of SSD 840 Pros is capable of is nothing short of amazing. When configured as a RAID 0 array, two drives reached 188,382 random read IOPS and 177,380 random write IOPS.
Final Thoughts:
Samsung's SSD 840 Pro is one of, if not the best, consumer-grade SSDs on the market today. By itself, the drive is capable of some impressive performance numbers, but when two or more are combined in a RAID array, the results are nothing short of amazing. Using a pair of 256GB SSD 840 Pros and an off the shelf, Ivy Bridge-based PC, I was able to read at speeds as high as 1,081 MB/s and write at speeds in excess of 950 MB/s. This level of performance carried over to our random write tests, where the two drives were able to produce more than 177,000 IOPS at high queue depths. Admittedly, this is a bit excessive for the average consumer but if you're someone who regularly pushes their computer to its limits, a few SSD 840 Pros in a RAID array may just be what the doctor ordered.
The SSD 840 Pro is available now in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. Prices on Amazon.com currently range from $137 up to $475, with the 256GB version featured here going for about $230.
