Today we put the Samsung PM853T 480GB SSD through our quick benchmarks. Samsung has an excellent reputation for high performing and reliable SSDs. In contrast to the the Samsung 845DC Pro the lower cost Samsung PM853T and 845DC EVO drives utilize TLC NAND. The Samsung PM853T combines TLC NAND, similar to the 845DC EVO with power loss protection via tantalum capacitors. Samsung says that in the industry standard 4K random workload over five years the PM853T can handle 0.3 DWPD.
Test Configuration
Since we are going to assume the use of already released hardware, we are using a legacy system for testing across the test suite:
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7PESH3
- Processors: Dual Intel Xeon E5-2690 (V2)
- SAS Controller: LSI SAS 3008
- RAM: 64GB DDR3L-1600MHz ECC RDIMMs
- OS SSD: Kingston V300 240GB
We are using a SAS controller so one cannot compare our SATA results directly to consumer-driven setups where a SATA SSD is connected to an Intel PCH port. There is a latency penalty for going over the PCIe bus to a controller to SAS. It also is a reason NVMe is going to be a game changer in the enterprise storage space. This impact is very tangible and we will have a piece comparing the SAS 3008 with a few other SATA controllers soon.
Samsung PM853T 480GB SSD Quick Benchmarks
For our quick tests during this part of the series we will just provide the quick benchmarks with only a bit of commentary. The results should be fairly straightforward and we have added a few results for comparison purposes.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD is a solid benchmark that does not write compressible data to drives. The result is perhaps one of the best workstation SSD benchmarks available today.
We probably could have done an all-Samsung review but we instead opted to add both drives from Intel, including the new Intel D S3610 and a Toshiba SSD. As one can see all five SSDs are relatively close in performance. The high queue depth writes favor non Samsung drives. We also see some excellent sequential write gains over the SM843T which is a MLC drive.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is another benchmark which gives non-compressible read/write numbers. This is in contrast to the ATTO Benchmark used by LSI/ Sandforce and its partners when they market a given solid state drive.
Again we see performance from the PM853T 480GB in the middle of the pack compared to its peers in most cases. The sequential read side we see a small victory from the Samsung drive.
ATTO Benchmark
The value of the ATTO benchmark is really to show the best-case scenario. ATTO is known to write highly compressible data to drives, which inflates speeds of controllers that compress data like LSI/ SandForce does prior to writing on a given solid state drive.
Again, in terms of read performance, the PM853T 480GB is very similar to what we see from other drives in this class.
Looking at sequential write performance we do see the Samsung PM853T 480GB SSD track very closely to the Samsung 845DC EVO 480GB drive which is expected. The drive does perform better than the Intel DC S3610 400GB SSD in sequential write performance but the other drives in our comparison generally can achieve a significantly higher performance level.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, we see solid performance from the PM853T but we do not see anything particularly stellar. On the other hand, the Samsung PM853T 480GB is a solid drive at an extremely attractive price point. We now have several PM853T models in the lab and do plan to have a few deployed to colocation facilities over the coming months as they have performed well in our first four months of testing. The drives are also selling on ebay for under $0.50/GB making them affordable on the second hand market.
