Samsung 850 Pro SSD Review (128GB) – 3D V-NAND Creates a New Playing Field

RAPID MODE BENCHMARK TESTING

With the new Samsung 850 Pro comes a new update to Samsung Magician that allows the end user to use it in RAPID (Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data) mode with up to 4GB of their system RAM. For those of you who don’t know what RAPID is exactly; it is simply a RAM caching algorithm. It filters through and analyzes your applications and data usage and optimizes the IO for Samsung SSDs accordingly to eliminate system performance bottlenecks. So essentially, it is like the extra DRAM on hardware RAID controllers, only it is much more advanced and allows for much faster speeds. So with that, let’s get with the benchmarks.

First up we have ATTO.

Initial results are very nice. We were able to reach a max of about 3,550MB/s read and 1,176MB/s write!

Next is Crystal Disk Mark.

In Crystal Disk Mark we see some even faster results. Sequential read and write speeds at about 6500MB/s and 3000MB/s write respectively. What is more impressive is the 4k speed coming in at just over 800MB/s! Now if only non-RAM cached 4k speeds could be like that and saturate the SATA interface.

Next is AS SSD.

Regaining consciousness after fainting from these AS SSD results… They sure are impressive! AS SSD shows us a staggering 1.7 million IOPS! Furthermore, sequential read and write speeds are in 4,500MB/s and 2,000MB/s range respectively. There is also a notable 3x increase in 4k read and write performance.

Finally we have Anvil’s Storage Utilities.

Here we finally see some discrepancy in the writes, which is completely viable. For the sequential write test we are only seeing 446MB/s write, thus we can conclude that that data was not processed in the RAPID storage pool, but sent straight to the drive instead.

Looking at the results from this new RAPID update, it shows a lot of improvement over the past version. Samsung finally allowed for more RAM to be used and seems to have tweaked and fine-tuned it now.  Having said that, we must give the user a disclaimer; performance increases from RAPID only happen in certain scenarios and benchmarks do reflect this. Not everything can be sped up by RAPID. In fact, from my own testing of RAPID on an 840 Evo, I can’t see much of a difference in my systems performance for most of my daily tasks. This is mainly because Windows already does RAM caching pretty efficiently as it is. Samsung’s RAPID simply complements it with a more aggressive algorithm. The high benchmark speeds are still a site to see though.