Samsung 840 Series 120GB Solid State Drive Review

Testing – HD Tune Pro
HD Tune 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. With HD Tune 5.00 both the read and write benchmarks have varied quite a lot, even with drives that have practically the same components so don’t take these results as your deciding factor for purchasing this drive.

hdtune read

Looking at the results we can see the drive had an average speed of 467.7MB/s, which is actually extremely good for this test and looking at the graph the transfer rate was pretty smooth, which says a lot for the controller.

Next up is the write benchmark.

hdtune write

The write benchmark hits the advertised 130MB/s for the most part and again is quite smooth.

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 file2

As you can see the drive performs well here, very close to the specifications.

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 file1

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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