Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB Review

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v6.0 and v7.

The SSD980 PRO doesn't do so well as the other PCIe Gen4 drives we've tested in the CrystalDiskMark 4K QD32 test but the Sequential test results do confirm the official ratings for the drive of up to 7,000MB/s read and 5,000MB/s writes. Looking at the two benchmark result screens, it appears that the new Elpis controller hasn't a preference for the type of data it's being asked to use.

The latest version of CrystalDiskMark, version 7, includes a couple of profiles that can be used for testing – Peak Performance and Real World. The result screens for these two profiles not only display MB/s results but also IOPS and latency.

Although in the Peak Performance profile we couldn't hit the maximum 7,000MB/s official read figure, the test result of 6,725MB/s is well on the way to it. We could however confirm the maximum 5,000MB/s write figure with the drive producing a test figure of 5,014.97MB/s.

We also used CrystalDiskMark 7 to test the random performance of the drive at lower queue depths (where most of the everyday workloads occur) using 1 to 4 threads. The read performance climbs smoothly throughout the tested queue depths and threads.

In the 4K random write tests, using 1, 2 and 4 threads the drive climbed smoothly to the QD2 mark and then began to flatten out. In the 3-tread test, the drive reached the QD4 mark before it began to level off.

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