AS SSD Benchmark vs Anvil’s Storage Utilities: Two Classic SSD Tools Compared
AS SSD Benchmark and Anvil’s Storage Utilities belong to the same generation of enthusiast SSD tools, and many review archives from the last decade contain results from both. They overlap on the basics — sequential and random testing with a summary score — but each has a signature feature the other lacks: Anvil’s offers selectable data compressibility and an Endurance mode designed to write a drive toward exhaustion, while AS SSD offers its Copy-Benchmark scenarios and Compression-Benchmark graph. This page compares the two classics honestly, including the fact that both are old. AS SSD is on our download page.
What Anvil’s Storage Utilities does
Anvil’s Storage Utilities was built by an enthusiast for enthusiasts, and it shows in the options. Beyond standard sequential and random tests, it lets you choose the compressibility of the test data — fully compressible, partially compressible or incompressible — and run threaded IO tests. That compressibility control matters because some SSD controllers accelerate compressible data, so a benchmark that only writes easy data can flatter them. Anvil’s made the data pattern an explicit variable instead of a hidden one, which is why reviewers kept version 1.1.0 in their test suites for years.
Its most distinctive feature is the Endurance mode: a test designed to keep writing to a drive continuously, the kind of punishing workload used to explore how a drive behaves as it accumulates writes. That is a specialist tool. Endurance running consumes drive lifespan by design, so it belongs on test-bench drives, not on the only disk holding your data. The software spent much of its life in beta and release-candidate form, and version 1.1.0 is the one the review record settled on; like AS SSD, it is best understood as a finished-era tool rather than a living project.
What AS SSD Benchmark does
AS SSD Benchmark takes the opposite design approach: fewer knobs, fixed definitions. Its synthetic tests — sequential, 4K, 4K-64Thrd and access time — run without the operating system cache on a 1 GB test file by default, and its simplified score (Read = Seq × 0.1 + 4K + 4K-64Thrd, likewise for Write) gives every drive a comparable total. Where Anvil’s exposes compressibility as a setting, AS SSD exposes it as a measurement: the Compression-Benchmark graphs throughput across the compressibility range in one run, so you can see a controller’s dependence on data pattern instead of sampling it one setting at a time.
AS SSD’s other signature is the Copy-Benchmark, which times three realistic transfers — ISO, Program and Game folders — using the operating system’s copy functions, caching included, because that is how real copies behave. Together with the drive information, controller driver and alignment status shown at the top of its window, AS SSD works as a quick everyday check: run it, screenshot it, compare it with the large public record of identical runs. Anvil’s, by contrast, rewards users who want to configure the test itself.
Side-by-side comparison
| Dimension | AS SSD Benchmark | Anvil’s Storage Utilities |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Seq, 4K, 4K-64Thrd, access time; Copy scenarios and a Compression graph | Sequential and random tests with selectable data compressibility and threaded IO; Endurance write mode |
| Score / result form | Per-test MB/s or IOPS plus Read, Write and Total scores from a simplified formula | Per-test results and a summary score for the chosen test configuration |
| Platform | Windows only; portable | Windows |
| Licence and price | Freeware by Alexej Schepeljanski; free | Free enthusiast utility |
| Maintenance status | Final version 2.0.7316.34247, January 2020 | Version 1.1.0 is the widely used release; long beta/RC history, now essentially unmaintained |
| Best for | A standard, comparable score, copy behaviour and compression profile in one quick run | Configurable test data compressibility, threaded IO exploration and specialist endurance testing |
Compressibility: setting vs graph
The compressibility difference deserves one more paragraph because it decides real purchases on older controller designs. With Anvil’s, you pick a data pattern and get the speed for that pattern — precise, but you need several runs to see the whole picture. With AS SSD’s Compression-Benchmark, one run draws the curve from compressible to incompressible, which makes a pattern-dependent controller obvious at a glance. Neither approach changes the underlying truth; they present it differently. If you are reproducing a specific published test, use the same tool and settings as the source; results across the two are no more interchangeable than any other pair of benchmarks, a point we develop in AS SSD Benchmark vs CrystalDiskMark.
Reproducing old results today
Because both tools are frozen in time, their results have an unusual virtue: comparability with the historical record. A review from the late 2010s that published AS SSD and Anvil’s figures can be re-run today, setting for setting, and the numbers should land in the same territory on the same hardware. That is genuinely useful when you are evaluating an older drive second-hand, following an archived tuning guide, or checking whether a firmware change altered behaviour that reviews documented years ago. The discipline required is to match the configuration exactly: Anvil’s compressibility and thread settings change its results materially, and AS SSD’s test size changes its results too, so note both alongside any figure you publish. Where a modern, maintained tool is required instead — for a brand-new drive on a current system — our comparison with CrystalDiskMark covers the actively developed alternative. The classics earn their place by continuity, not by novelty.
Verdict by scenario
Everyday check of a system drive: AS SSD Benchmark — faster to run, easier to compare, and its copy and alignment information is immediately practical. Investigating how a controller treats compressible data, or running controlled threaded-IO experiments: Anvil’s, in the hands of a user who knows which settings they changed. Endurance exploration: Anvil’s is the only one of the two with such a mode — on a sacrificial test drive only, with backups of anything that matters elsewhere. For most readers, AS SSD is the default and Anvil’s is the specialist drawer in the same toolbox; our best SSD benchmark tools overview places both in the wider landscape.
Get the standard tool first from our download page, and keep Anvil’s in mind when a test needs configuring rather than just running.