To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
We use the following folder/file types:
- 100GB data file.
- 60GB iso image.
- 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
- 50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
- 21GB 8K Movie demos.
- 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
- 11GB 4K Raw Movie Clips (8 MP4V files).
- 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of png, raw and jpeg images).
- 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
- 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
The drive had no problems dealing with our real life file transfers, with over 500GB/s speeds for most of the larger file sizes writing to the SATA drive.
To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSDs, we use the same files but transfer to and from a 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400:
As with the transferring of files between the drive and a standard SATA SSD, it's in the small bity file transfers where the performance in the NVMe to NVMe drive transfer drops considerably.