To test the 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.
- 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.
- Blu-ray movie.
The 990 Pro handled our real-life file transfers without any Problems, particularly when dealing with the larger file size transfers, averaging 545MB/s for writes and 452MB/s for reads when dealing with these file types.
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 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus drive:
Writing to and reading from an NVMe drive saw transfer speeds rocket and overall transfer times dropped dramatically. six of the transfers topped over 3GB/s when writing to the drive. Of the remaining seven tests, three topped 2.5GB/s and two topped 1GB/s when writing to the disk. The drive did seem to have a bit of a struggle when reading the 100GB data file, however.