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 850 EVO 120GB
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 120GB (RAPID Mode)
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 850 EVO'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.
The EVO 850's performance was hit and miss when tested with Iometer. While the drive was able to read at a respectable 527.39 MB/s, its sequential write speed averaged out at only 167.75 MB/s. With RAPID mode enabled, its read and write speeds jumped to 590.25 MB/s and 299.15 MB/s, respectively.
The 850 EVO's random read and write performance was a mixed bag. While the drive was able to read at a respectable 163.66 MB/s, its random write speed topped out at only 162.99 MB/s. With RAPID mode enabled, its random write speed jumped to 187.03 MB/s. However, it still lagged behind similarly priced drives like the OCZ ARC 100 and Crucial MX100.
According to Samsung, the 120GB 850 EVO is capable of 94,000 IOPS when reading and 88,000 IOPS when writing 4K blocks. In our tests, the drive reached 41,897 random read IOPS and 41,725 random write IOPS. With RAPID mode enabled, we saw a slight performance boost. This time around, the drive reached 46,640 random read IOPS and 47,881 random write IOPS.
