High-End SATA SSD Shootout: Samsung 860 Pro Vs. Kingston DC500M
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
High-end SATA SSD shootout: Samsung 860 Pro vs. Kingston DC500M:
Today, we're going to put to good use some of what we covered last year in our Storage Fundamentals series-specifically, we'll use fio to test two competing high-end SATA SSDs.
Each disk has its high points and its low points, and we'll cover both in detail as well as giving you some handy charts to compare the two directly.
[...] I'm not going to beat around the bush-when it comes to raw performance on simple workloads, the Samsung Pro is a faster drive than the Kingston, and there aren't any two ways about it. In almost every throughput test I threw at the pair, the Samsung 860 Pro ran about 50 to 75 percent faster than the DC500M did.
[...] The DC500M offers significantly better write latency than the 860 Pro, even all the way at the left end of the chart-the fastest 1 percent of all 4K writes complete in 775 microseconds on the Samsung, versus only 375 microseconds on the Kingston. But the real story doesn't happen until around the 30th percentile, where the 860 Pro's latencies start increasing dramatically-but the DC500M's latencies do not.
[...] The Samsung 860 Pro does not have PLP [(Power Loss Protection)] and therefore can't guarantee the safety of blocks in its DRAM cache-so sync writes must actually get all the way to the metal before the sync() call can return. That means the Samsung ends up with less than a 10th the sync throughput of the truly data center-grade DC500M.
[...] It probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the much more consumer-oriented Samsung 860 Pro is likely the best choice for most consumers. What might come as a surprise to many Ars readers is just how affordable a true data center SSD-like the DC500M-can be, even when bought in single units.
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