Last Updated on May 5, 2021
Disk Benchmarks
Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is the latest industry-standard software interface for PCIe SSDs. NVMe enables drives to benefit from the same “pool” of lanes that directly connect to the CPU. The latest PCIe 4.0 drives can offer in excess of 7,000MB/s reads and 6,500MB/writes. We don’t find this technology on mini PCs, as the latest PCIe 4.0 interface is only found on a few motherboards. But even with the older PCIe technology, we can get read speeds in excess of 3,000MB/s and write speeds over 2,000MB/s.
You can see a clear difference in performance when you use NVMe, with a read/write throughput far higher than the hard drives and slower SATA SSDs also lagging somewhat behind. But it’s not always a huge difference.
For the machines in question, only the HP EliteDesk and the two AWOW machines (AK41 & NYI3) support NVMe M.2 SSDs. The other machines support SATA SSDs.
Our HP EliteDesk unit came supplied with a Samsung SM961 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. This 256GB NVMe SSD has read speeds of up to 3100 MB/s and write speeds up to 1400 MB/s.
For the EliteDesk, GNOME Disks reports a figure rounded up to 3200 MB/s with sequential reads using 100 samples with a sample size of 10 MiB. The two AWOW machines, by comparison, are lamentable.
The GNOME Disks benchmark, of course, is a synthetic throughput that rarely corresponds with reality. Nevertheless, the HP EliteDesk’s fast dual-channel DDR4 RAM and lightning fast NVMe SSD definitely offer a speed burst when running Manjaro’s desktop compared with the Lenono M93 (the next best performer).
We wanted to verify the GNOME Disks tests as its rated speed is actually higher than the maximum claimed by the manufacturer. We therefore performed an extra disk speed test with dd. Note that we are using a blocksize of 1 MiB (whereas the GNOME Disks test is using a different sample size).
$ sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync
$ sudo /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3
$ dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
The chart below shows the findings (the test on each machine was run 5 times).
We didn’t test write speed. Remember, you cannot unmount a filesystem that’s in use. And the GNOME Disks write benchmark is destructive.
Before wiping Windows, we ran CrystalDiskMark, another open source benchmark disk drive benchmark tool. The results for the HP EliteDesk 800 G2’s NVMe SSD are below.
Next week’s blog will move on to testing the EliteDesk’s multimedia capabilities.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / System
Page 2 – Processor
Page 3 – Memory
Page 4 – Graphics
Page 5 – Disk
Complete list of articles in this series:
| HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini Desktop PC | |
|---|---|
| Week 6 | Lightweight gaming on the HP EliteDesk |
| Week 5 | Multiple operating systems running on the HP EliteDesk |
| Week 4 | Hardware graphics acceleration when watching videos in Firefox |
| Week 3 | Multimedia on the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 USFF PC |
| Week 2 | Benchmarking the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 USFF PC with other machines |
| Week 1 | Introduction to the series including wiping Windows and installing Manjaro |
This blog is written on the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini Desktop PC.
This machine was made available by Bargain Hardware. Bargain Hardware retails refurbished servers, workstations, PCs, and laptops to consumers and businesses worldwide. All systems are completely customisable on their website along with a vast offering of clean-pulled, tested components and enterprise replacement parts.
| EliteDesk 800 G2 | Lenovo M93 | AWOW AK41 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Tiny Desktop PC | Tiny Desktop PC | Mini PC |
| Processor | Intel i5-6500T 2.50 GHz (Turbo 3.10 GHz) 4 cores and 4 threads | Intel i5-4590T 2.00 GHz (Turbo 3.00 GHz) 4 cores and 4 threads | Intel Celeron J4115 1.80GHz (Turbo 2.5 GHz) 4 cores and 4 threads |
| Chipset | Intel Skylake | Intel Haswell | Intel Gemini Lake |
| Memory | 16GB DDR3 (2133 MHz) | 16GB DDR3 (1600 MHz) | 8GB DDR4 (2133 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel HD Graphics 530 | Intel HD Graphics 4600 | Intel UHD Graphics 605 |
| Disk | 256GB Samsung NVMe SSD | 240GB Crucial SSD | 128GB Foresee NVMe SSD |
| AWOW NYI3 | Gigabyte BXBT-1900 | Asus UX305FA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Mini PC | Mini PC | Laptop |
| Processor | Intel Core i3-5005U 2.00GHz 2 cores 4 threads | Intel Celeron J1900 2.00GHz (Turbo 2.416 GHz) 4 cores 4 threads | Intel Core M-5Y10c 0.8GHz (Turbo 2.00GHz) 2 cores 4 threads |
| Chipset | Intel Broadwell | Intel Atom Z36xxx/Z37xxx | Intel Broadwell-U-OPI |
| Memory | 8GB DDR4 (1600 MHz) | 4GB DDR3 (1600 MHz) | 8GB DDR3 (1866 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel HD Graphics 5500 | Intel HD 2GB | Intel HD Graphics 5300 |
| Disk | 128GB Kingston NVMe | 250GB Samsung SSD 860 | 128GB SanDisk SSD |
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