File System Copy
A specific kind of test we performed is the drive performance copying large files from one location on the drive to another location. We are not transferring between drives; we are copying a file in one folder on the drives and copying it to a new folder location on the drive. This is a pure file copy, on the same drive. This should stress the SSD’s performance in a unique way. We tested a 100GB file, a 10GB file, and a 1GB file. We are measuring performance and the time it took to copy.
First is a disk copy of a 100GB file. We are looking for a lower number. According to our test, the XPG SX8100NP was actually faster copying the file. It did so in 1.4 minutes while it took 1.87 minutes for the Samsung 970 EVO 1TB to complete.
In this graph, we are looking at the time to completion for the 10GB and 1GB file. This time the tables reverse, for these smaller files the Samsung 970 EVO 1TB is faster, 7.5 seconds on the 10GB file versus 8.4 seconds. On the 1GB file, it was 0.3 seconds versus 0.4 seconds.
We used DiskBench to also look at the transfer rate as they were copying. You can see why the large 100GB file was slower on the Samsun 970 EVO 1TB SSD. It was only transferring at 910MB/s while the XPG SX8100NP was transferring at 1150MB/s. We don’t know why the Samsung was slower at this large file, but we did repeat the test many times.
The tables flip though on the smaller files, the Samsung 970 EVO 1TB is much faster at transfer rate at 10GB and 1GB file copy sizes. We even got up to 3GB/s on the smallest file.