Recently we have seen several forum members start to purchase Samsung SV843 960GB SSDs. Here is an example link with some discussion of the drives. These larger capacity SSDs feature Samsung’s Tantalum capacitors for power loss protection. Beyond this, they are specd for 3.6 DWPD for 5 years. This is twice that of the Samsung SM843T SSDs. Samsung is well known for their solid controllers, innovation as a manufacturer of NAND, and solid firmware. Today we are taking a 960GB SV843 through our quick benchmarks to compare it to many of the drives we have already tested.
Test Configuration
Since we are going to assume the use of already released hardware, we are using a legacy system for testing across the test suite:
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7PESH3
- Processors: Dual Intel Xeon E5-2690 (V2)
- SAS Controller: LSI SAS 3008
- RAM: 64GB DDR3L-1600MHz ECC RDIMMs
- OS SSD: Kingston V300 240GB
We are using a SAS controller so one cannot compare results directly to consumer-driven setups where a SATA SSD is connected to an Intel PCH port. There is a latency penalty for going over the PCIe bus to a controller to SAS. It also is a reason NVMe is going to be a game changer in the enterprise storage space.
Samsung SV843 960GB SSD Quick Benchmarks
For our quick tests during this part of the series we will just provide the quick benchmarks with only a bit of commentary. The results should be fairly straightforward and we have added a few results for comparison purposes.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD is a solid benchmark that does not write compressible data to drives. The result is perhaps one of the best workstation SSD benchmarks available today.
We can see that the Samsung SV843 960GB drive performs very well, especially in the 4K write categories. We can see that some of the SAS drives in our comparison are pushing higher read and write speeds. That includes the SAS3 Toshiba PX02SMF080 800GB drive which has more bandwidth available to it.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is another benchmark which gives non-compressible read/write numbers. This is in contrast to the ATTO Benchmark used by LSI/ Sandforce and its partners when they market a given solid state drive.
Again, we see that the Samsung SV843 960GB is performs well on our 4K tests. In the read tests it generally performs in the top half of our comparison group.
ATTO Benchmark
The value of the ATTO benchmark is really to show the best-case scenario. ATTO is known to write highly compressible data to drives, which inflates speeds of controllers that compress data like LSI/ SandForce does prior to writing on a given solid state drive.
This is an extremely interesting graph. We see the Samsung SV843 960GB drives perform very well at small transfer sizes but there is a bit of a dip on the 64k size. We tried in two different systems and then on the Intel controller. This blip happened on the LSI/ Avago controllers but not on Intel controllers. We do know that many SATA disks behave slightly differently on SAS controllers so this is an example.
On the write side, we see a very similar pattern. The small file size results are excellent.
Conclusion
In our testing the Samsung SV843 960GB drive performed extremely well. The small file size performance was certainly excellent in our tests. With 3.6 full drive writes per day of endurance over the almost 1TB worth of capacity, there is certainly enough write endurance available for the vast majority of workloads. Overall, Samsung SV843 SSD performed very well in our tests, and proved to be faster than many of the competitive offerings we compare the drive against.
