Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSD Review

Anvil Storage Utilities

Version and / or Patch Used: RC6

So, what is Anvil Storage Utilities? It's a storage benchmark for SSDs and HDDs where you can check and monitor your performance. The Standard Storage Benchmark performs a series of tests; you can run a full test, or just the read or the write test, or you can run a single test, i.e. 4k QD16.

Anvil Storage Utilities is not officially available yet, but we've been playing with the beta for several months now. The author, Anvil, has been updating the software steadily on several international forums, and is adding new features every couple of months.

We can use Anvil several different ways to show different aspects for each drive. We've chosen to use this software to show the performance of a drive with two different data sets. The first is with compressible data, and the second data set is incompressible data. Several users have requested this data in our SSD reviews.

0-Fill Compressible Data

Incompressible Data

The performance with compressible data and incompressible data is the same, so you don't have to worry about performance loss while editing audio, video, or files that are already compressed.

Low Queue Depth Read IOPS

Samsung is the only SSD manufacturer to reach 10,000 random 4K IOPS in a 2.5" SATA SSD. The 840 EVO made it to this high mark, but used TurboWrite to nudge the performance to the mark. The 850 Pro on the other hand reaches 10K random IOPS the old fashion way, with bruit force. The 850 Pro also scales really well as the queue depth increases.

High Queue Depth Read IOPS

It's rare for us to get to high queue depths when reading data, especially on a drive as fast as the 850 Pro.

Low Queue Depth Write IOPS

At low queue depth random writes, the 850 Pro 256GB is in a crowded field, but as the queue depths increase, the drive starts to pull away from most of the competition.

High Queue Depth Write IOPS

At very high queue depth levels, the field starts to level out with several SSDs hitting the upper limits of SATA III.