Benchmarks: File Copy Test
We expected the 840 Pro to be faster than the SSD 830, but didn't think it'd deliver a 57% performance improvement in our 6GB file copy test. Having run this test several times on both the X79 and Z77 platforms, we consistently received transfer speeds in excess of 300MB/s. Consequently, this also made Samsung's newcomer 61% faster than the Vertex 4 and 45% faster than the Crucial m4.
Our program copy test is comprised of many small non-compressed files (6104 files totaling 2.75GB). The 840 Pro's performance surprised us again, though not for positive reasons this time. Strangely, the drive would only provide a throughput of 111.4MB/s – much slower than competing units.
Again, these results are based on an average of three runs, that said each run provided virtually the same figure. Furthermore, testing on both the Z77 and X79 platforms yielded the same results. It's unclear to us how the 840 Pro went from 57% faster than the SSD 830 in the previous test to now 40% slower – perhaps this is a firmware-related issue.
The game copy evaluation uses a mixture of small and large compressed and uncompressed files (1336 files totaling 2.75GB). The 840 Pro's performance was more in line with expectations here, scoring 10% faster than the SSD 830 and 2% slower than the Vertex 4.
It's interesting to note that the 840 Pro performed very well in copy tests that consisted of compressed files, while non-compressed files caused performance problems.