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 M.2 250GB
Samsung SSD 850 EVO M.2 250GB (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 M.2'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 M.2's performance was hit and miss when tested with Iometer. While the drive was able to read at a respectable 526.45 MB/s, its sequential write speed averaged out at only 324.88 MB/s. With RAPID mode enabled, its read and write speeds jumped to 592.37 MB/s and 552.51 MB/s, respectively.
The 850 EVO M.2 performed very well when doing random reads and writes. In our tests, the drive was able to read at 164.49 MB/s and write at 295.3 MB/s. This by itself is impressive, but with RAPID mode enabled, its random write speed increased to 307.88 MB/s.
According to Samsung, the 250GB 850 EVO M.2 is capable of 95,000 IOPS when reading and 89,000 IOPS when writing 4K blocks. In our tests, the drive reached 42,111 random read IOPS and 75,597 random write IOPS. Increasing the queue depth had little impact on the 850 EVO M.2's random write performance. However, with the queue depth set to 32, the drive was able to reach 96,045 random read IOPS.
