Anvil's Storage Utilities:
Anvil's Storage Utilities is another benchmark designed with SSDs in mind. The standard storage benchmark measures a drive's performance by testing its transfer speeds, access times and IOPS.
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 980 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 980 PRO's performance was very similar to what we saw in our other tests. The drive was able to read at 6401.9 MB/s and write at 4649.86 MB/s.
The 980 PRO also performed very well when doing random reads and writes. In our tests, the drive was able to read at 456.39 MB/s and write at a blazing 790.71 MB/s.
According to Samsung, the 500GB 980 PRO is capable of 800,000 IOPS when reading and 1,000,000 (yes, a million) IOPS when writing 4K blocks with sixteen threads and at a queue depth of 32. With two threads and a queue depth of three, the drive reached 116,837 random read IOPS and 202,473 random write IOPS.
As with most drives, the 980 PRO performed better with more threads and at higher queue depths. With a Ryzen 3 3100 processor, I could run only eight threads within Iometer and, as you can see above, this seemed to limit the drive's random read and write speeds. Even with a queue depth of 128, the drive reached only 476,733 random read IOPS and 429,868 random write IOPS. This is still an impressive feat, but it's well short of the million IOPS that Samsung claims that the drive is capable of.
