Samsung SSD 970 EVO NVMe 1TB SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0

Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 1, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

Anvil SSD Benchmark with 100% Compression (incompressible data):

Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) showed the Sasmung SSD 970 EVO 1TB drive had an overall score of 15,546.35 points. The drive topped out at 2,848 MB/s read and 2,427 MB/s write speeds on the sequential performance test with 4MB file sizes.

Anvil SSD Applications Benchmark at 46% Compression:

Benchmark Results: With the compression at 46% to help mimic real world applications better we found the overall score dropped just slightly to 15,339.32 points.

Benchmark Results: When it comes to Random 4K performance at various queue depths we found solid performance numbers across the board!

Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K Random Write performance, the Samsung SSD 970 EVO looked really good with the highest numbers of any drive that we have tested so far at the higher queue depths. This is the first drive to break 400K IOPS at QD32 and no drive could beat it above QD8.