AIDA64 Disk Benchmark

The AIDA64 Disk Benchmark performs linear read and write bandwidth tests on each drive, using file chunk sizes of 1MB to speed up testing and minimizes jitter in the waveform. Because of the full sector-by-sector nature of linear testing, Benchmark Reviews endorses this method for testing SSD products, as detailed in our Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing article. AIDA64 Disk Benchmark does not require a partition to be present for testing, so all of our benchmarks are completed prior to drive formatting.

Linear disk benchmarks are superior bandwidth speed tools in my opinion, because they scan from the first physical sector to the last. A side affect of many linear write-performance test tools is that the data is erased as it writes to every sector on the drive. Normally this isn’t an issue, but it has been shown that partition table alignment will occasionally play a role in overall SSD performance (HDDs don’t suffer this problem).

1TB Samsung 970 EVO Read Results

The high-performance storage products tested with Lavalys AIDA64 Disk Benchmark use a 1MB block size option. Charted above, performance on the 1TB Samsung SSD 970 EVO measured average read speeds of 2890 MB/s.

AIDA64 linear write-to tests were next…

1TB Samsung 970 EVO Write Results

The waveform chart above illustrates how this NVMe M.2 SSD managed file write transfers. The Samsung SSD 970 EVO briefly recorded linear write-to speeds around 2464 MB/s, likely filling the 1GB DDR4 cache buffer, before sequential performance dropped to produce average write speeds around 864 MB/s.

The chart below shows the average linear read and write bandwidth speeds for SATA devices tested with AIDA64:

Linear tests are an important tool for comparing bandwidth speed between storage products – although HDD products suffer performance degradation over the span of their areal storage capacity. Linear bandwidth certainly benefits the Solid State Drive, since there’s very little fluctuation in transfer speed. This is because Hard Disk Drive products decline in performance as the spindle reaches the inner-most sectors on the magnetic platter, away from the fast outer edge.

In the next section we compare M.2 SSDs using Anvil’s Storage Utilities Benchmark…