Comments on: Samsung 980 Pro 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD Review

By: Martijn Maas

Martijn Maas — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 05:15:02 +0000

I would certainly go for the SK Hynix P41 over this Samsung 980 Pro, as of which you can’t call the endurance pro. Samsung is preferring price/volume over quality/endurance.

By: Jay Kastner

Jay Kastner — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 10:38:03 +0000

Will, Appreciate your thoughtful testing procedures. As I deal with upgrades frequently for older systems I run into RAM maxed out and SSDs needed for swapping/paging, where any Cache helps.

By: Will Taillac

Will Taillac — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 00:40:36 +0000

JJ,
The ‘focus’ as you put it is on sequential numbers because they are the statistic most commonly cited by manufacturers as a performance metric; the front of the box on the SSD will say “7000 MB/s” on it, not quote a 4K random read number. I provide some focus here because I like to ensure manufacturers ‘do what they say’ and actually hold up their end of the bargain. In addition, random performance is harder to directly quantify because there are a bunch more factors that play in that are workload specific. With that said, 3 of my tests (Anvil, ASSSD, and SPEC) are all heavily influenced by non-sequential performance, so I don’t feel like I ignore that aspect of the performance.

Jay,
There are benchmark utilities that can track write speed across an entire disk like that, but the method I use to perform this test does not have that capability. I use multiple instances of a utility for creating randomized data – not a benchmark utility – and then just measure disk performance ‘from the side’ by looking at task manager. I will eventually run into performance problems with this method; my ability to generate random data is CPU limited and tops out at around 5 GB/s, so when SSDs can sustain write speeds at 5 GB/s or greater I’ll have to change methodologies or get a faster CPU.

As for how fast the cache will empty, that depends on a bunch of factors. If the drive is at a reasonable percentage of use – like 60-80% full – and TRIM has been run somewhat recently (Windows runs it weekly by default) then if you write out 10 GB of data it should get ‘unspooled’ from the cache relatively quickly. This behavior is somewhat unofficially tested as part of my benchmarks – after filling the drive and then reducing to the testing capacity (between 60% and 70% full) I very rapidly run all the benchmarks back-to-back, not allowing the drive time to idle. Some drives with poor cache handling do not respond well to this and it shows up in their results.

By: Jay Kastner

Jay Kastner — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 16:28:30 +0000

Great reviews, Will, thank you!
Interesting are the “post cache” writes, maybe you are able to plot those from the beginning of a test upto the point where the cache is full and the speeds do not change anymore, to determine cache size?
Also – how fast would the cache empty, e.g. you write 10 GB and wait 5 sec, then dump another few GB into the SSD.

By: JJ

JJ — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 06:52:59 +0000

As a relatively new reader I am wondering why all the focus in these SSD reviews is on sequential read and write results? My understanding is that random read and access time is crucial to how fast a drive will perform and feel in daily use, so it would be nice to see those numbers compared in a graph. The instances where you’d be writing to the drive at 7+GBps in every day use would be small, while you will always be doing random reads and writes for booting, opening apps, saving documents, etc.

By: Will Taillac

Will Taillac — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 23:42:05 +0000

Eric,
The white gloves have a much more mundane explanation: my fingers always seem to be cut up or injured from one thing or another, so gloved white fingers look better than a bloody mess. When I bought my open-frame test bench it came with some white gloves, presumably because part of it is lexan and to prevent fingerprints, and at some point I was racking my brain on something different to use for a drive picture and decided just put on the gloves and hold the dang thing. That’s all 🙂