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How to test HDD/SSD/NVMe speed?

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-Ice

Member
Joined
Nov 26, 2011
I purchased and installed a Samsung 960 Evo 250GB NVMe drive and using Samsung Magician, I don't seem to be getting good results out of it. Using the performance benchmark in Magician, the 960 Evo's best results are 6,560-1,218-215,455-18,823 for sequential read-write and random IOPS read-write. In comparison, my 850 Evo 256GB was getting 6,448-1,230-246,080-19,853. The 960 also takes about 7-8 minutes to run the test while the 850 takes around 3 minutes. My 5 year old Crucial M4 256GB gets 6,103-1,210-221,875-19,303.

My 960 is currently my OS drive, the Crucial M4 still contains my old OS but is no longer a boot drive, and the 850 contains games. Am I missing something here?
 
ATTO, Crystal Disk Mark, Anvil Storage Utilities, PCMark in various versions. There are many benchmarks but I guess these are the best for comparison.
 
Thank you for that info! I've decided to use Crystal Disk Mark and here are my results:

Disk%20Test%20Compiled_zpsghs33erv.jpg


This is now confusing me... the NVMe clearly shows an improvement over the SATA SSDs (W: and X: drives) so why is Samsung Magician giving me these results:

Disk%20Test%20Magician_zps7dkrwmn7.jpg
 
Different benchmarks are going to use different methods to measure storage speed. And different settings can show dramatically different numbers, even for the same benchmark. Crystal Disk Mark is fine for quick simple testing, but isn't going to give you the whole story. Try messing with some settings and see what happens. And definitely test with a few more benchmark tools.
 
Well, I'm not sure how to make of this now. Sure, the speeds are faster on testing, but moving icons around the desktop and the whole experience just feels slower. Heck, forcing icons to move around (ie, by deleting some icons on inserting an icon between other icons) and I can clearly see the slow movement. Did I miss some setting somewhere? I've installed Samsung's NVMe drivers.

OTOH, the OS is on the NVMe drive but the actual desktop "folder" is on a HDD.... but this wasn't a problem when the OS was on a SSD and the desktop "folder" was on a HDD....
 
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