(Fastest SSD ever!) Unexpected bench results on Samsung EVO 850

[napster100]

Hi guys, I was just playing around with Samsung Magician and benched the drive and got a satisfactory result, then I when optimising it with the options provided and enabled rapid mode, then benched again about 3 times and I'm getting extremely ridiculous results (see in pic)...

Um, these can't be legit, right? I mean SATA 3 only handles bandwidth up to 6Gb/s... This is suggesting 59Gb/s...

 

[Mattios]

No that isn't correct - try using Crystal Disk Mark.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there napster100.

This actually is correct and you have enabled RAPID mode. This uses a portion of your RAM for caching and thus you get pretty accelerated speeds. Note that this sometimes may lead to insufficient memory if you don't have enough RAM. Take a look at this review here: http://techreport.com/review/25282/a-closer-look-at-rapid-dram-caching-on-the-samsung-840-evo-ssd
Although it's about a previous model, the explanation about this mode is basically the same.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[Mattios]

Ohh that RAPID mode is interesting, I didn't know about it. My mistake!

 

[Boogieman_WD]

No worries, mate. We can always learn new things here. That's why it's a great community.

 

[napster100]

Hey there napster100.

This actually is correct and you have enabled RAPID mode. This uses a portion of your RAM for caching and thus you get pretty accelerated speeds. Note that this sometimes may lead to insufficient memory if you don't have enough RAM. Take a look at this review here: http://techreport.com/review/25282/a-closer-look-at-rapid-dram-caching-on-the-samsung-840-evo-ssd
Although it's about a previous model, the explanation about this mode is basically the same.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

I'm shocked! Hum, interesting read too, thanks for that. I also have 16GB RAM so running out isn't a common issue for me aha, it's only happened when I was running a VM and playing a game lol.

Still not sure whether to keep it enabled then, since it does prove to be faster after subsequent operations, but slower in many cases. I guess I'll just see how I get on with it. Thanks for the information though, it helped a lot!

 

[napster100]

I hope they do optimise RAPID mode more though, it does seem to have potential! I also hope they let users manually set a cache size, since others like me have plenty to throw around at things like this, and I guess it will further benefit the SSD's I/O.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

You are most welcome.
Well, I guess the amount of memory it uses depends on how much RAM you have in your system and sets it automatically based on that. Unfortunately, I think there's no option to set this manually, yet. There's a pretty informative thread posted by @JohnnyLucky, which might shed some more light on that technology: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-2202571/samsung-ssd-magician-rapid-mode.html.