Samsung SSD 970 PRO NVMe 512GB 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) the Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB drive had an overall score of 16,105.98 points. The drive topped out at 3,121.95 MB/s read and 2,183.37 MB/s write speeds on the sequential performance test with 4MB file sizes. Random 4K QD16 performance reached 178,000 IOPS read and 362,000 IOPS write. The ‘old’ Samsung SSD 960 PRO on the same test system scored 14,561 points, so we are seeing about a 10.6 percent uplift in the overall score on this popular benchmark utility.

Anvil SSD Applications Benchmark at 46% Compression:

Benchmark Results: With the compression at 46% to help mimic real world applications better the overall score dropped just slightly to 15,987.74 points. This is about 12.3% higher than the socre that we got on the Samsung SSD 960 PRO 512GB drive. Solid performance uplifts here!

Benchmark Results: When it comes to Random 4K performance at various queue depths we found the Samsung SSD 970 PRO is among the fastest drives that we have tested. The HP M.2 SSD EX920 1TB performance was close to that of the Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB model.

Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K Random Write performance, the Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB drive pulled away from the HP SSD EX920 M.2 1TB drive and never looked back. The QD1-4 Random Write performance is amazing on the 970 PRO 512GB drive as it was nearly as fast as the Intel Optane drives at QD1-2 and was faster than all the drives in the chart at QD3.

Here are a couple charts that show just the Samsung 960 PRO 512GB drive versus the 970 PRO 512GB to show the generational improvements.