The Samsung Magician v7.0 offers a quick look at the drive's performance with around 6.47GB/sec reading and 3.90GB/sec writing performance.

The AJA Test System shows a quick overview of the drive's reading/writing speed, having around 3.71GB/sec writing and around 4.05GB/sec reading.

Passing to a more well-known benchmark, the ATTO Disk Benchmark shows the performance with various file sizes from 0.5Kb, 1Kb, and 2Kb up to 8192MB file sizes. The drive didn't perform very well with this software, we have seen similar behavior with other drives also.

Passing to the newest ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01.0F1, again performance was very good and reached 6.05GB/sec reading and 4.27GB/sec writing performance.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.4

CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2

CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0

CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4

Getting into AS SSD Benchmark software, the drive got an average score of 6891 points.

Passing the IOMeter test, with our custom configuration, the drive performed well with 41060.97 points, notice the max I/O response time of 6.1903ms, which is higher, compared with traditional designs, due to its host memory buffer (HMB) design, in real life you will not notice any delays.

Passing to real-life writing tests now, we used a Samsung 980Pro 1TB drive as the source to test the writing abilities of the addlink S91 1TB M2230 drive.

The first test was to try to write a single file of 44GB data from the Samsung 980Pro 1TB to the addlink S91 drive. The writing performance was very good (averages 2.88GB/sec) and we didn't have any drop in writing speed. All tests were done with TerraCopy software.

The drive working temperatures start from 46 Celsius (idle) and for a 44GB file reached 58Celcius and after the test finished dropped again to around 48 Celcius.

The next step was to find out the writing limits of the DRAM-less design, this time we used a single 286GB file of data from the Samsung 980Pro 1TB to the addlink S91 1TB M2230 drive.

The drive had a good performance at the start (2.88GB/sec writing performance) and around 100GB writing mark point, it dropped its writing speed for a little while and with some up and down drops its writing speed at 95Mb/sec after 200GB mark point. This is a typical behavior for DRAM-less NVME drives, while DRAM-enabled NVMEs keep constant writing performance among the whole file.

Τaking a second run with the same test, showed again the major drop in writing speed around the 200GB mark.

With the 286GB file size copying test, we did notice higher temperatures up to 65 Celcius at full load.

The drive due to the Gen4 design does keep high working temperatures under high loads and in case of overheat will drop its running speed. Running the drive without any kind of cooling may introduce reduced performance. For that purpose, we removed the passive heatsink from the Asus motherboard and we re-run the above tests.

Using the 44GB file, we didn't noticed any thermal throttling.

The measured temperatures didn't exceed 65Celsius and we got full performance from the drive.

how about the 286GB file? Will this time the drive thermal throttle? The answer is yet but partially...When the drive exceeded 80 Celsius it dropped performance from 2.8GB/sec down to 800MB/sec, however no sooner than 100GB mark, so we do have some kind of thermal throttle but again the drive ramps up writing speed as soon it cools down.

The drive under heavy writing load does get very hot and tops 81 Celsius (no heatsink) and at that point drops writing speed to protect itself. So it's advised to have the drive under a passive heatsink, especially if you perform high volumes of reading/writing every day.