Samsung 830 Series 128GB Solid State Drive Review

Testing – HD Tune Pro
HDTune Pro is one of the most popular hard drive software suites available. It has many different benchmarks and tests built into it.  Our first test is the read benchmark, which tests the average read speed and access time of the drive.

hdtune read

hdtune read graph

Our results here are very impressive, actually the best we have had for a 2.5-inch solid state drive.  Averaging 436.6MB/s throughout the entire test is quite a feat.  Also you can see there is hardly any fluctuation at all, which means the drive will stay at the same speed when you are reading data from it.  Up next we have HD Tune’s write benchmark.

hdtune write

hdtune write graph

Now compared to the other drives the drive did not perform great at all, but the advertised max write speed of this drive is 320MB/s so having an average of 291.1MB/s is not that bad at all.  Also there was not much fluctuation at all.

Now we have the Random Access test.  This test measures the performance of random read and write operations. Tests are taken in 512b, 4KB, 64KB, 1MB, and random file sizes. The performance of the drive is reported in operations a second (IOPS), average access time and average speed. Here are both the results from the read and write random access tests.

hdtune io read

hdtune io write

We normally like the see 5000 and over in the 4K test.  You can see that it exceeded that in both the read and write tests.

In HD Tune Pro 5.0 the file benchmark is actually 2 tests now.  The first is the normal file benchmark we are used to see that tests different transfer speeds over specific file lengths.

hdtune file1

The newly added file benchmark also tests a file size (500MB for our test) and gives you sequential read and write speeds.  It also gives you IOPS for 4KB random single and 4K random multi.

hdtune file2

As you can see from the above graph the drive performs right up to specifications.

HD Tune also has a set of extra tests.  Here are the results of those for both read and write.

hdtune extra read

hdtune extra write

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