The test system used in this review is equipped with an Intel Core i7-6700K CPU, GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-UD3 motherboard, 32GB (16GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 memory, ADATA SU800 512GB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 Enterprise.
To test the performance of Samsung's 960 PRO SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark 8. For comparison, I've also included test results from Toshiba's OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, Toshiba OCZ VX500, ADATA Ultimate SU800, Plextor S2C, Crucial M300, Plextor M7V, PNY CS1311, OCZ Trion 150, PNY CS2211, Plextor M6V, Crucial BX200, OCZ Trion 100, Kingston HyperX Savage, Crucial MX200, OCZ Vector 180, Samsung SSD 850 EVO and Samsung SSD 850 PRO.
As I mentioned earlier, the 960 PRO uses Samsung's new Polaris controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 5.0.3:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark tool measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its random read and write speeds using blocks 512K and 4K in size.
 Samsung 960 PRO 512GB |
 Toshiba OCZ RD400 512GB |
According to Samsung, the 960 PRO is capable of reading at 3,500 MB/s and writing at 2,100 MB/s. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the drive had no problems reaching these speeds in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the 960 PRO's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.
Samsung 960 PRO 512GB
Samsung's new NVMe driver prevented us from testing the 960 PRO's write speed with HD Tach. Nevertheless, the drive had an average read speed of 1953.9 MB/s as well as a burst speed of 2126.7 MB/s.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the 960 PRO's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 0.5KB to 8192KB and the total length set to 256MB.
 Samsung 960 PRO 512GB |
 Toshiba OCZ RD400 512GB |
When tested with ATTO, the 960 PRO's read speeds topped out at about 3,504 MB/s and its write speeds at 2,147 MB/s.
