Samsung 970 EVO M.2 NVMe (1TB) - Benchmarking

[napper_tapper]

Hi all, 

 

I came across a little quirk in one of my old benchmark runs on UserBenchmark:

 

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/12659435

 

I noticed that the drive came in on the 39th percentile with the following:

 

2,494 MB/s sequential read,

2,255 MB/s sequential write. 

 

I was surprised because I thought my motherboard could support the full capability of the drive (3,500 read and 2,500 write). So I ran Samsungs' benchmarking software (Wizard) and got:

 

3,412 MB/s sequential read,

2,308 MB/s sequential write.

 

Is this difference because of the way UserBenchmark do their benchmark or did my drive just have a bad day then? 

 

Now time for probably a stupid question, but since the PCIe 3.0 x4 bus can handle up to 3,940 MB/s is there a way to overclock or tickle the Samsung drive up to that limit? It isn't far off it. 

[phoenixflower]

4 hours ago, rmurph17 said:

I came across a little quirk in one of my old benchmark runs on UserBenchmark:

 

My recommendation is just to ignore it, UserBenchmark is doing weird stuff lately.  Try to use tests to test your workloads that you care about.

 

https://www.atto.com/disk-benchmark/ can be a great indication at different workloads.  Those big numbers are just sequential read/write anyway.  What you really care about are IOPS at the different queue depths 1,4,8,16 and your read/write speed at the different block sizes 4 KB, 8 KB, 16 KB are pretty standard workflow block sizes.  After that you start approaching media streaming and sequential workloads.

[phoenixflower]

4 hours ago, rmurph17 said:

Now time for probably a stupid question, but since the PCIe 3.0 x4 bus can handle up to 3,940 MB/s is there a way to overclock or tickle the Samsung drive up to that limit? It isn't far off it. 

You can overclock your storage by using a file system that will aggressively cache your workload in memory such as ZFS.  If you have sufficiently enough memory 24 GB+ and you're on Windows 10 you can try using PrimoCache or Diskeeper (https://www.condusiv.com).  You'll find that you'll get better IOPS and generally better read/write at different workloads by amending help to the Windows Kernel to create more buffered reads/writes.

 

If you're asking if there's a way to simply overclock your bus lanes.  The answer is yes but it will make your NVME unstable.  The bus speed (100 Mhz) impacts everything on your system but will cause instability with peripherals and is not the result you are looking for.