Testing – Anvil, PCMark Vantage & AIDA64
The next test is Anvil Storage Utilities, which is a really great piece of software. The SSD benchmark gives you scores for both read and write as well as a combined score.
We also use Anvil to test IOPS. The Threaded Read and Write tests are great for this. On each one we set the QD to 32.
Next up is PCMark 8, we will be running the typical Storage Benchmark.
We have added back AIDA64’s Disk Benchmark to our testing. The linear tests will actually scan from the first physical sector to the last on the test drive. This gives a good representation of sustained read / write operations. We will be running the linear read and write tests using a 1MB block size.
The write test will shows that SLC caching is being utilized. You can see while that drive starts out the write test at around 470 MB/s it drops down to around 110 MB/s. We typically see SLC caching used on TLC-based drives, but this is an MLC-based drive and it seems the implementation is much better. For instance the TLC-based drives we’ve tested drop off at around 5-10% when writing the entire drive without any idle time. With the VX500 we can see that the drive gets all the way to 53% before dropping off. This is actually really impressive as there is no cache chip on the 512 GB version of the drive.
