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this video is brought to you by the brand-new fractal design define our five computer case silence redefined click the link in the description for more information excellent hello everyone in today's video we're going to talk about SSDs and how to benchmark them and also be featuring this Samsung 850 Evo 250 gigabyte SSD because it's new and fast this tutorial is intended for beginners though so apart from assuming that you have a basic working knowledge of computers and what a computer is I will start with some SSD terminology basics just so you know what the heck I'm talking about for the rest of the video so an SSD is a solid-state drive it stores your precious bits of data onto what is known as NAND flash modules which have no moving parts and can be very very fast this is the same basic storage technology that is in a USB thumb drive for example or the built-in storage on your smartphone but manned alone does not an SSD make it needs to be incorporated with some other elements before it can be wedged into your desktop or laptop PC the form factor is important that's the physical size and shape of the drive and for SSDs right now that's most commonly the 2.5 inch form factor that has been used for some time just like the 850 Evo here other SSDs use the M SATA or PCIe form factor which you may have also seen m2 is the new form factor this is formally known as ng FF physical compatibility here is determined by a width which is the width that way as well as the length which is the length that way this Plextor m6e for example is an m2 20 to 80 drive which means it's 22 millimeters wide and 80 millimeters long I have another video that's all about m2 since it's still pretty new so feel free to check that out if you want more information on m3 specifically so you'll need to check the form factor to make sure that the drive you're looking at will fit into your system or your laptop but you also want to check the connector 2.5 inch drives still use the standard SATA connector which is very common and the m2 connector is determined by the drives width which is 22 millimeters for the one I just showed you as well as the keying again more on and my m2 video the protocol refers to the communication standard between the drive and the rest of your system again SATA is the standard here although PCI Express drives are becoming more popular every day the protocol will determine how much bandwidth is available for the drive to use to communicate so the SATA revision 3 protocol that's prevalent right now has 6 gigabits per second of available bandwidth between the drive and your system also keep in mind here that when we talk about theoretical bandwidth such as what is available via SATA Rev 3 we use a raw bit rate to refer to what's possible 6 gigabits per second but when we refer to the actual benchmarks that we're measuring measurable data throughput will refer to it using bytes so you'll see 500 megabytes per second for example 8 bits make a byte just in case you didn't know there are also a few internal elements to the drive to point out the connector will route over to the drives controller which as the name implies controls the data being written to or read from the NAND and it also handles stuff like garbage collection and we're leveling that I'm not going to delve into today some drives will also add a DDR memory chip next to the controller for caching purposes but for caching this 850 Evo actually uses part of its own built-in NAND but it sets it into SLC mode so that brings us back to the NAND which is where the bits of data are actually stored and the NAND is what makes this 850 Evo so special first of all Samsung has developed a way to stack layers and layers of NAND flash on top of each other so even though the chips inside this drive look quite flat they're actually 3d inside 3d vertical Nan's like this is very new but it also represents a big leap forward for solid-state storage Samsung introduced 3d v-nand with the 850 Pro which stored 2 bits of data in each available cell within the NAND flash that's also known as mlc or multi-level cell NAND as opposed to the much faster but also very expensive SLC or single-level cell NAND that's mostly used in enterprise and server environments and military applications that sort of thing the 850 Evo has TLC or triple level cell man meaning it stores 3 bits of data in each cell which also makes it more cost-effective to produce so altogether that's triple level cell 3-dimensional vertical NAND technology and you can use it to store your cat pictures to sum up the terminology section of this video though I would say that the form factor and connector determined the physical compatibility of the drive the protocol determines how much available bandwidth the drive has and then the speed of both the controller and the NAND flash itself is what determined how fast the SSD can actually perform so now that you know how to talk about an SSD let's say you want to benchmark your brand-new SSD to see if it actually hits those impressive numbers advertised on the retail box I'm going to focus on the typical SATA experience with my 850 Evo now but most of this will also apply to m dot 2 or PCIe drives as well benchmarking preparation will involve plugging the drive into your computer and booting up remember that your motherboard also has a controller and you'll need to set that controller to the right mode you'll get the best performance by connecting to the native controller on your motherboard which for my system back here is part of the x99 chipset you also might have a z97 chipset or a 990 FX chipset for example on the AMD side that can also control your SATA ports so make sure you're connecting to a SATA revision 3 6 gigabit per second port check your motherboard manual if you need to or else you might bottleneck your new SSD boot into the UEFI BIOS section of your motherboards UEFI BIOS and to find your SATA controller settings make sure it's using a HCI mode or RAID mode will also work here but honestly there's no need to go into RAID mode if you're not also setting up a raid array just stick with AHCI just don't use IDE also keep in mind here that if your operating system is on another drive connected to that same controller and you switch it you might not be able to boot into Windows after changing them to the controller mode but Google IDE to ahci and there's easy tutorials for how to do a quick registry fix to get around that problem also remember that if your operating system is installed and running off of the SSD you can still go ahead and benchmark that SSD but you're not going to get quite the same performance since the drive will have other things on its mind like keeping your operating system up and running after you boot it up though you'll want to initialize and format the new drive in Windows Disk Management utility then it should pop up is a new fresh and clean drive ready to go so what we're going to do today with our benchmarking is we're going to look at the four quarters of SSD performance those are sequential read sequential write random read and random write so sequential read and write tests show how the drive handles large files so video is always a good example these will require as much data throughput as possible they want to write it as fast as I can or read it as fast as they can usually these test results are listed in megabytes per second and the fastest SATA drives right now that are able to fully saturate the available six gigabits per second of bandwidth on the state of our ev3 bus can head maybe 500 to 550 megabytes per second random reads and writes show how the drive handles many small operations at the same time this will usually be listed as AI ops in the test results or input/output operations per second now the drives are way way too fast for you or I to manually be able to give it enough work to do to actually achieve its maximum I ops but the synthetic tests that we're going to show today queue up as many commands as they can to stress the drive that's why you'll usually see queue depth 32 for the random read and write tests one last metric is response time but since SSDs move at the speed of electricity these values are usually incredibly low and they're rarely compared between drives at least in my experience I only bring this up because response time for SSDs is such a huge leap from older mechanical hard drives and this is what makes an SSD based system just feel so fast then that's all thanks to the drive being so responsive I chose these three SSD benchmarking tests because they're free they're pretty easy to use and they give a good idea of your drives performance so let's start with a tow this drive benchmark has been around for quite some time it's always a go-to for manufacturers themselves who are looking to show a drives peak performance so after you install it just choose your SSD hit start it's going to run a series of tests using different file sizes I usually run the default settings but then I'll try queue depth for as well as queue depth 10 which will give the drive a little bit more to work with just remember that these results are in kilobytes so divide that number on the right column by a thousand and that will give you megabytes per second so nice and easy next we have a SSS D from Alex intelligence software also quite simple to run and I like that it will tell you if it approves of your storage configuration or not via the green text on the upper left in the window if this text is red then it means that a SSS D thinks you should change something about your configuration this test will give you sequential read and write speeds for K tests which are actually honestly the closest thing to real-world performance for many of these synthetics 64 thread tests which queue up as many commands as it can to achieve maximum input/output operations per second and response time which I usually just look at and think to myself man that's fast so switch the view to eye ops if you want to see eye ops after the test is over of course and also note that there are a few more built-in tests within AS SSD to try to mimic real-world PC activities so you can try those out if you want to compare them to other drives there's a compression benchmark to which I really only find useful for drives that use on-the-fly compression methods which at this point is mostly SandForce controlled drives from the past four years or so our third benchmark is crystal disk mark it's also very easy to use and it's free here I usually go with a 1 gigabyte file size and I just run all the tests with three passes sequential reads and writes are here again a 512 K test and a 4 K tests that use smaller file sizes and of course the ever-important 4kq depth 32 tests for maximum I ops after the tests run go to edit and hit copy and paste your results into notepad or some other editing software and you can see your eye ops and you can also see a few more details about your benchmarking run so if you're watching my benchmark test results you might have spotted a few things specifically about the Samsung 850 Evo my a doe tests it about 550 megabytes per second reads and 525 megabytes per second writes I had an amazing 96 thousand I ops read score and a s SSD and crystal disk mark showed about 75 ki ops writes and 80 ki ops read on the one hand these are very impressive numbers but on the other hand they're not standing out too much further ahead of any of the other high-end SSDs in the past year or to say this is because the SATA revision 3 protocol is limited to 6 gigabits per second of bandwidth in the real world no drive can really achieve much past about maybe five hundred and fifty megabytes per second in any test while connected via SATA rev3 it is a bottleneck PCIe drives like the newer m2 offerings can up the bandwidth to 10 or 20 gigabits per second so I am excited to see what Samsung is able to do with this new technology using that newer protocol if you're an SSD veteran you probably notice that I skipped a few things in this video there are definitely other metrics to benchmark SSDs by and the four-corners tests that i've run today do focus a lot more on achieving the maximum performance possible to see what a drive can do rather than actually looking at real-world benefits also Iometer is another benchmarking tool that i really can't go without at least mentioning it's widely used in the industry but it is a bit more complicated to set up and run so let me know if you guys would be interested in another video dedicated specifically to that software because it's pretty dense I would also like to say that using blended tests that mix reads writes sequential and non sequential activity can give you a better idea of how the drive can handle a mixed workload let's face it if you have this drive installed in most situations you're not going to be just dealing with all sequential reads or all simple intial writes right consistency is another metric that I find very important but that also is a more complex topic so I'm gonna link an article in this video's description about right consistency along with some of the links to the benchmarking tools that I use so you guys can download those and try them out as well as some suggested further reading links to sites that I often firuze for SSD info less tocar and the crew at SSD review do a fantastic job as does Alan Melvin tile and the folks over at PC perspective and of course the infamous Christian motto from Ann Ann's Tech scene here writing the bumper cars in South Korea that is all for this video though but let me know what SSD or SSDs you are currently running in the comment section down below this video don't forget to hit the like button because it makes the world a better place subscribe to my channel for more tech videos check out my store at pulse hardware net for shirts like this one and we'll see you all next time