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Samsung 850 EVO 120GB

TESTING & METHODOLOGY

To test the drive, we cloned our test rig drive to the SSD. It is the same test drive we’ve been using on all of our drive testing and is nothing more than a clean Windows load with all the drive testing software installed, as well as all the current drivers and patches for the OS. It’s the equivalent of doing a fresh load of OS from the disc but takes a lot less time and ensures that every drive tested uses exactly the same OS load and drivers. Nothing that may effect the outcome of the testing procedure can creep in. We ran all of the tests a total of 3 times and averaged those results. The Average of the three results are presented here. In the case of a pictorial benchmark we ran the bench 3 times and picked the median result. As with most SSD testing differences from run to run are minimal and the median result is a good indication of what you can expect from the drive. We ran our usual battery of tests on the drive, and used it as the primary boot drive during testing. All of the drives tested were used as the primary boot drive during testing. That’s a more realistic test than strapping the drive in and testing it with a bare format or as a non-boot drive and it represents real life transfer rates, much like you can expect when you install and operate the drive in your own system. Each test was performed 3 times and the average of the 3 test run is reported here.

Test Setup

Test Setup
Case Type None
CPU Intel Core i7 3770K
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-Z77-UD3H
Ram Kingston HyperX 1600
CPU Cooler Prolimatech Megahalem
Storage Drives
  • Samsung 850 EVO 120GB
  • OCZ ARC 100 240GB
  • Crucial MX100 256GB
  • OCZ Vertex 450 128GBx2
  • OCZ Vertex 460 240GB
  • OCZ Vector 256GB
  • OCZ Vertex 4 256GB
  • OCZ Vertex 3 256GB
  • OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 256GB
  • Crucial RealSSD C400 256GB
  • Intel SSD 520 256GB
  • Seagate Momentus XT 750GB
  • Seagate 600 Pro 256GB
Optical None
GPU PNY GTX 670
Case Fans 120mm Fan cooling the mosfet CPU area
Docking Stations None
Testing PSU Cooler Master UCP 900W
Legacy None
Mouse Microsoft Intellimouse
Keyboard Logitech Keyboard
Gaming Ear Buds None
Speakers None

Results

Iometer

Iometer_4K_Read_Q1

We start with the random read result from the Iometer. The 850 EVO performs rather well here as you can see it even beats out some of the 250GB drives on the market with 36.68 MB/s transfer rate.
Iometer_4K_Read_Q3

Iometer_4K_Read_QD32

The drive continues to perform well at higher queue depth. At queue of 4, it scored a 147 MB/s and 405 MB/s for the queue depth of 32. Interestingly enough, it appears that RAPID seems to cause the drive to take a slight performance hit here.

Iometer_4K_Write_Q1

The random write for the 850 is excellent with 73.09 MB/s. RAPID helps our drive to yield double the bandwidth to 166.66 MB/s.

Iometer_4K_Write_Q3

At queue depth of 4 (typical desktop workloads), our 120GB is unfortunately being bottlenecked by the lack of parallelism where it delivered 155 MB/s transfer rate. Even with RAPID, we are only seeing about 14% improvement. Still, the drive is not slow by any means and as you can see it is very close to the 256GB OCZ ARC 100.

Iometer_4K_Write_QD32

Similiar to the queue depth 4, the 120GB drive yields same result here at queue depth 32.

Iometer_4K_Sequential_Read_Q1

The sequential read is excellent where the drive topped the chart at 440 MB/s. The RAPID does not have much impact in the performance here.

Iometer_4K_Sequential_Read

Even at higher queues, our 120GB still manages 485 MB/s and the RAPID manages to deliver 13% improvement in the performance.

Iometer_4K_Sequential_Write_Q1

The sequential write for 120GB drive manages to deliver 154 MB/s and with RAPID, we get 19% improvement.

Iometer_4K_Sequential_Write

Higher queue does not yield much better performance due to lack of parallelism on our drive.

Crystal DiskMark 3.0.3 x64

We ran the CrystalDiskMark with the default 1GB test size.

Crystal_DishMark_4k_Read

Crystal_DishMark_4k_Read_QD32

As expected, the 850 EVO does very well here taking the top stop in the random read.

Crystal_DishMark_4k_Write

Crystal_DishMark_4k_Write_QD32

The 850 EVO does really well in the CrystalDiskMark’s random write test. The drive even take the top spot at the queue depth 32.

Transfer File Size
Transfer Rate (MB/s)
500MB
368.1
1GB
364.6
2GB
354.4
4GB
155.2

We re-ran the test with different test pattern so we can see how the drive performs under non-Turbo environment. When we select 4GB of test file, which is larger than the 3GB reserved space, the drive is able to write at 155 MB/s.

Crystal_DishMark_Sequential_Read

Crystal_DishMark_Sequential_Write

The 850 EVO does well in the sequential read and write with 525 MB/s and 506 MB/s transfer rate respectively.

Crystal_DishMark_512k_Read

Crystal_DishMark_512k_Write

 

Review Overview

Performance - 9
Value - 8.5
Quality - 9.5
Feature - 9.5
Innovation - 9.5

9.2

Samsung 850 EVO 120GB

The Samsung 850 EVO offers excellent performance and features. Backed with 5 year warranty, the drive is definitely the best all-around SSD that your money can buy. We give the 850 EVO our coveted Golden Bear Award.

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