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 128GB
Samsung SSD 840 Pro 128GB (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 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.
The 128GB SSD 840 Pro's performance was very similar to what we saw in our other tests. The drive was able to read at 501.42 MB/s and write at 366.18 MB/s. With RAPID mode enabled, its read and write speeds jumped to 571.1 MB/s and 437.25 MB/s, respectively.
The 128GB SSD 840 Pro also performed very well when doing random reads and writes. In our tests, the drive was able to read at 157.86 MB/s and write at 336.9 MB/s. This by itself is impressive, but with RAPID mode enabled, its random write speed jumped to 356.93 MB/s.
According to Samsung, the 128GB SSD 840 Pro is capable of 97,000 IOPS when reading and 90,000 IOPS when writing 4K blocks. In our tests, the drive reached 40,411 random read IOPS and 86,247 random write IOPS. RAPID mode had little impact on the SSD 840 Pro's random read performance. However, with it enabled, the drive was able to reach 91,373 random write IOPS.
Final Thoughts:
Even now, more than a year after its release, the Samsung SSD 840 Pro remains one of the top consumer-grade SSDs on the market. Much of this is due to the drive's impressive performance but, as you saw here, even the SSD 840 Pro can benefit from Samsung's RAPID technology. Like the other versions of the drive we've reviewed, the 128GB SSD 840 Pro performed very well in our tests. By itself, it was able to read at speeds as high as 535 MB/s and write at speeds in excess of 390 MB/s. With RAPID mode enabled the results varied a lot from one benchmark to another, but even on the low end the drive's sequential read and write speeds increased by 70 MB/s. RAPID mode also had a big effect on the SSD 840 Pro's random write performance. When tested with Iometer, the drive's random write speed increased by 20 MB/s, giving it the ability to deliver more than 91,000 IOPS at low queue depths.
If you already own an SSD 840 Pro, I recommend downloading the latest version of Samsung's Magician software and giving RAPID a try. If you don't own the drive yet, it is available at most retailers in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. Prices on Amazon.com start at $115 for the 128GB version and go up to $400 for the top of the line 512GB drive.
