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.
- 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K 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 handles large file sizes a lot more effectively than smaller ones, as can be seen by the 500MB/s+ figures for the tests made up of larger files (ISO image, Blu Ray movie etc).
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.
To give a better idea of just how much faster going from NVMe to NVMe drive is, as opposed to going from a standard SATA SSD, the 1000GB data file took 3m 13s to transfer from the SATA SSD to the SSD970 EVO Plus and 3m 40s to go the other way. When the same file was written to the NVMe drive from the SSD970 EVO Plus it took a mere 52s to read and just 1m 11s to write to the Samsung drive.