It's also insanely cheap if you compare it to equivalent-performance products from this generation (read: *insanely* fast). The difference between these and mainstream SATA SSDs is like the difference between a Toyota Corolla and a Porsche 911 turbo.
Samsung are claiming "up to 400K IOPS random read/write". Really?? 1.6GB/sec *random*? Wow.
Most of it is just marketing. It's fast but unless you have special needs you're not going to feel much of a difference between this and your average SATA SSD in daily use.
If all you are doing is driving down the street to the grocery store in heavy traffic are you really going to notice much of a difference?
I've yet to see much of if any difference in the vast majority of workloads I or my customers do on a daily basis between many different models and types of SSD.
Don't tell me, it has nothing to do with actual performance (something you can relate to an SSD) and everything to do with comfort (something you can't really relate to an SSD). No gear shifts? No noise? Because I've yet to see the practical aspect of ludicrous mode when driving to the grocery store.
For normal usage today there's a limit beyond which you simply cannot tell the difference anymore because the returns are smaller and smaller. And while you can see the performance difference in 0.1% of use cases, you can feel the price difference in 100% of them. It's just like 4K resolution on a small phone because it must be 4 times better than 2K.
When Gigaplex says 2K, he is referring to FHD 1920x1080 pixels. 4K 3840x2160 pixels is indeed four times the resolution of FHD, or '2K' by the new horizontal naming scheme (which I personally don't like).
No typo: "Missing In Action" is what the article states the 1TB model is. It was promised, but hasn't yet materialised. Read the end of the article for speculation on why it may never appear.
Pass on the SSHD. Get the 6700 and an 850Evo or if you really on a budget something like a Sandisk Ultra II. NVMe is more hype than anything else right now. Waiting for more native drivers. Don't notice too much difference going 950pro from an ancient 830!
Calling it hype is quite a stretch... But if someone needs to all whether their usage case would benefit from a faster drive, then there's a high probability that it won't. There's definitely usage cases that see plenty of benefit tho.
Content creation can fall squarely between consumer or pro spaces there's definite work cases there that'll benefit from PCI-E drives, which have nothing to do with enterprise/servers.
Don't think you understand what hype means. Just because it's a fast drive that most consumer won't benefit much from doesn't make it hype. If Samsung were spending a lot on consumer advertising pushing how beneficial these are to consumers that would be hype.
My own experience is that it's the biggest upgrade you can make after switching from an hd to an ssd.
I first experienced PCI ssd performance in a MacBook Pro, and going stepping up to a 1GB/s ssd was great.
I next upgraded a Mac Pro from a samsung 840 pro (550MB/s) to an SM951, about 1.6GB/s on that machines pcie2 bus. Night and day responsiveness improvement. Everything is just instant
So, I would suggest not underestimating the difference an step change jump in performance can make when of performance has otherwise stagnated for the last few years.
I can't believe we're talking about SSDs that haven't been released yet and this far into the game they'll STILL be 3 times more expensive than they should be when they finally do arrive. So to summarize, the outlook is that Samsung's future SSD release will be extremely low capacity, extremely expensive and provide performance that almost no one will be able to tell apart from what was available one or two years ago. Awesome! I simply can't wait to not buy any!
Calling a 1TB M.2 drive "extremely low capacity" is unreasonable. Current technology makes it pretty much impossible to deliver any more than that on a single-sided M.2 2280 as a mass market product. As for pricing, yes it's high, but it's also going down even though there's hardly any real competition.
1) that 1TB capacity has been available in various forms for a long time now. Very very little no improvement have we seen over that time. And how many really need multiple TBs for mobile? Maybe 1TB is huge for mobile and maybe there's a market out there of people willing to spend large sums of money for the ability to play the latest games to fill a drive like that on a mobile platform (BOGGLE) but for us normal mortals with any sort of media to store 1TB is pathetic and M.2 is neigh on useless. At the same time, drives well in excess of 2TB could be made with U.2 which brings us to the next problem....
2) That prices are STILL going up on these 1TB drive releases. This is like moving backward, not forward. I'm actually starting to think that manufacturers are deliberately capping capacity to milk the market.
With 128Gb NAND dies and a practical stacking limit of 16 dies per package, 2TB requires 8 packages. SanDisk managed to put four flash packages on a single-sided M.2 for the X400, but using a SATA controller that comes in a pretty small package. Existing PCIe controllers wouldn't be able to fit the DRAM alongside in the 22mm width of a M.2 module, and stacking the DRAM on the controller would make thermal problems much worse. Putting four packages on each side of an M.2 drive would also make for a pretty expensive PCB and would make it hard to stay within the height limit. So we're close, but it's not going to happen until 256Gb or larger 3D NAND chips are available in suitable quantities and prices, and single-sided 2TB M.2 PCIe won't be possible with any combination of chips due to be available this year except maybe using Micron's 384Gb 3D TLC.
Thanks for clarifying this for me, Billy. Samsung introduced its 2nd generation V-NAND (32-layer 3-bit MLC V-NAND) chips in August 2014, and launched its 3rd generation V-NAND (48-layer 3-bit MLC V-NAND) chips in just one year. Do you suppose they might release the 4th generation in the next two years?
Samsung announced (or released already, not sure) BGA 512GB SSD. Was mentioned here as well. 4 of those just barely fit on a single M.2 side with a tiny (and likely slow-ish) controller. So, you can manage 4TB if you fill both sides. Not sure about height limitation though.
Obviously talking about 2280, which is the usual m2 SSD size. 22110, which is also a part of specs and can be found on some boards, should easily fit 4 such chips for 2TB with place for a decent controller and whatnot.
i've found the 950 pro extremely slow. i really hope samsung will start doing a capacitor for write cache. normal workloads have low queue depths, and samsung's synchronous write speed is worse than normal ssd. even burst perforrmance seems worse than sm951 did... in linux 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 1.02526 s, 1.0 GB/s
Yeah checked everything. Tried googling, but lots of people using old motherboards clouding issue.
Both Microsoft and Samsung NVMe drivers slow, disabled ASPM, high C states etc in BIOS, latest firmware of SSD, not sure about motherboard, but it was latest at the time. Last time I tried contacting Samsung about 10MB/sec read speeds on SSD they didn't do anything at all other than say speeds can be variable. Their support is beyond useless.
I tested the Samsung PM961 1TB with the following results from Crystal Disk Mark. Very impressive, overall though it looks like the Intel 750 is better.
I redid the test and increased the random thread count set up to 8 from 1 before (per recommendation). Results shown below. Results are closer to what I was expecting (esp the IOPS), but I think the Intel 750 is still slightly better. It will be interesting to see what the SM961 can do. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- * MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s] * KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
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eek2121 - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Would kill to have that 1TB drive in my Lenovo Y700.main_shoby - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
-__- just for 521$ ?thats insanely cheap if you compare it from 2 years old prices.
voodoobunny - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
It's also insanely cheap if you compare it to equivalent-performance products from this generation (read: *insanely* fast). The difference between these and mainstream SATA SSDs is like the difference between a Toyota Corolla and a Porsche 911 turbo.Samsung are claiming "up to 400K IOPS random read/write". Really?? 1.6GB/sec *random*? Wow.
bug77 - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Not at QD1 I'm afraid.Kvaern1 - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Most of it is just marketing. It's fast but unless you have special needs you're not going to feel much of a difference between this and your average SATA SSD in daily use.smilingcrow - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Exactly.keitaro - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
but.... I can boot the OS 0.3 second faster than before with this!alfreddelacruz - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Every 0.1 sec counts! hahahaDuckeenie - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
'bout time us special needs folks got a break.Holliday75 - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
If all you are doing is driving down the street to the grocery store in heavy traffic are you really going to notice much of a difference?I've yet to see much of if any difference in the vast majority of workloads I or my customers do on a daily basis between many different models and types of SSD.
Byte - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
As someone who has a muscle car and now has an electric. YES even going to the grocery store is a big difference!close - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Don't tell me, it has nothing to do with actual performance (something you can relate to an SSD) and everything to do with comfort (something you can't really relate to an SSD). No gear shifts? No noise? Because I've yet to see the practical aspect of ludicrous mode when driving to the grocery store.For normal usage today there's a limit beyond which you simply cannot tell the difference anymore because the returns are smaller and smaller. And while you can see the performance difference in 0.1% of use cases, you can feel the price difference in 100% of them. It's just like 4K resolution on a small phone because it must be 4 times better than 2K.
Pissedoffyouth - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
You mean 2x 2KGigaplex - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
No, 4x 2K. It's twice as dense in both axis, meaning 4 times as many pixels.Technometry - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
When Gigaplex says 2K, he is referring to FHD 1920x1080 pixels. 4K 3840x2160 pixels is indeed four times the resolution of FHD, or '2K' by the new horizontal naming scheme (which I personally don't like).Shadow7037932 - Friday, June 24, 2016 - link
Sure, but chances of you noticing the performance in real world usage is practically none, unless you do things like run a bunch of VMs and stuff.pashhtk27 - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
He'll kill to have it. So no need to worry about the price unless he kills a homeless man.JKJK - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
I'm ordering one the second they're aviable in norway!QinX - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
I'm looking outside my window but i've yet to see flying SSDs.You might have to wait a couple of generations for that feature.
PS:
I know you meant available, but I read that typo as, able to fly.
MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
M.2 really makes those drives fly if you know how to throw them!wrkingclass_hero - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Hopefully Samsung won't ovoid releasing this in the E.U.extide - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Well, it's OEM, they aren't releasing it anywhere...-MadAd - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Itll be available in a roundabout way.wishgranter - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
edit a typo MIA should be N/A its on the Samsung 950 Pro line under 1024 GB option :Dasmian - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
No typo: "Missing In Action" is what the article states the 1TB model is. It was promised, but hasn't yet materialised. Read the end of the article for speculation on why it may never appear.KunalG - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Which is better?I5-6300HQ with PCIe NVMe SSD or I7-6700HQ with 1TB SSHDByte - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Pass on the SSHD. Get the 6700 and an 850Evo or if you really on a budget something like a Sandisk Ultra II. NVMe is more hype than anything else right now. Waiting for more native drivers. Don't notice too much difference going 950pro from an ancient 830!Impulses - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Calling it hype is quite a stretch... But if someone needs to all whether their usage case would benefit from a faster drive, then there's a high probability that it won't. There's definitely usage cases that see plenty of benefit tho.Gigaplex - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
In the consumer space, it really is hype. You need specific workloads to make use of it, and they're usually more enterprise or server focused.Impulses - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Content creation can fall squarely between consumer or pro spaces there's definite work cases there that'll benefit from PCI-E drives, which have nothing to do with enterprise/servers.smilingcrow - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
Don't think you understand what hype means. Just because it's a fast drive that most consumer won't benefit much from doesn't make it hype. If Samsung were spending a lot on consumer advertising pushing how beneficial these are to consumers that would be hype.estarkey7 - Monday, June 27, 2016 - link
No hype at all! When I'm editing 4K ProRes video that is 92MB for each second of footage, you need the fastest storage money can buy!smilingcrow - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Depends what you want to do.stux - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Are you speaking from first hand experience?My own experience is that it's the biggest upgrade you can make after switching from an hd to an ssd.
I first experienced PCI ssd performance in a MacBook Pro, and going stepping up to a 1GB/s ssd was great.
I next upgraded a Mac Pro from a samsung 840 pro (550MB/s) to an SM951, about 1.6GB/s on that machines pcie2 bus. Night and day responsiveness improvement. Everything is just instant
So, I would suggest not underestimating the difference an step change jump in performance can make when of performance has otherwise stagnated for the last few years.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Responsiveness and bandwidth are two different things.Magichands8 - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
I can't believe we're talking about SSDs that haven't been released yet and this far into the game they'll STILL be 3 times more expensive than they should be when they finally do arrive. So to summarize, the outlook is that Samsung's future SSD release will be extremely low capacity, extremely expensive and provide performance that almost no one will be able to tell apart from what was available one or two years ago. Awesome! I simply can't wait to not buy any!Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 21, 2016 - link
Calling a 1TB M.2 drive "extremely low capacity" is unreasonable. Current technology makes it pretty much impossible to deliver any more than that on a single-sided M.2 2280 as a mass market product. As for pricing, yes it's high, but it's also going down even though there's hardly any real competition.Magichands8 - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
The problem is that:1) that 1TB capacity has been available in various forms for a long time now. Very very little no improvement have we seen over that time. And how many really need multiple TBs for mobile? Maybe 1TB is huge for mobile and maybe there's a market out there of people willing to spend large sums of money for the ability to play the latest games to fill a drive like that on a mobile platform (BOGGLE) but for us normal mortals with any sort of media to store 1TB is pathetic and M.2 is neigh on useless. At the same time, drives well in excess of 2TB could be made with U.2 which brings us to the next problem....
2) That prices are STILL going up on these 1TB drive releases. This is like moving backward, not forward. I'm actually starting to think that manufacturers are deliberately capping capacity to milk the market.
Eden-K121D - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Are you Drunk ?MadAd - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Its an outlook news article and as such is on topic for this site. If you want to read luddite weekly or lastyearstech.com then feel free.fera79 - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Is it possible to produce using current technology 2 TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD's?Billy Tallis - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
With 128Gb NAND dies and a practical stacking limit of 16 dies per package, 2TB requires 8 packages. SanDisk managed to put four flash packages on a single-sided M.2 for the X400, but using a SATA controller that comes in a pretty small package. Existing PCIe controllers wouldn't be able to fit the DRAM alongside in the 22mm width of a M.2 module, and stacking the DRAM on the controller would make thermal problems much worse. Putting four packages on each side of an M.2 drive would also make for a pretty expensive PCB and would make it hard to stay within the height limit. So we're close, but it's not going to happen until 256Gb or larger 3D NAND chips are available in suitable quantities and prices, and single-sided 2TB M.2 PCIe won't be possible with any combination of chips due to be available this year except maybe using Micron's 384Gb 3D TLC.fera79 - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Thanks for clarifying this for me, Billy. Samsung introduced its 2nd generation V-NAND (32-layer 3-bit MLC V-NAND) chips in August 2014, and launched its 3rd generation V-NAND (48-layer 3-bit MLC V-NAND) chips in just one year. Do you suppose they might release the 4th generation in the next two years?Zizy - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Samsung announced (or released already, not sure) BGA 512GB SSD. Was mentioned here as well. 4 of those just barely fit on a single M.2 side with a tiny (and likely slow-ish) controller. So, you can manage 4TB if you fill both sides.Not sure about height limitation though.
Obviously talking about 2280, which is the usual m2 SSD size. 22110, which is also a part of specs and can be found on some boards, should easily fit 4 such chips for 2TB with place for a decent controller and whatnot.
mercutio - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
i've found the 950 pro extremely slow. i really hope samsung will start doing a capacitor for write cache. normal workloads have low queue depths, and samsung's synchronous write speed is worse than normal ssd. even burst perforrmance seems worse than sm951 did... in linux 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 1.02526 s, 1.0 GB/sin windows about 800mb/sec read. 4x pci-e 3...
linster - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Did you make sure firmware, NVMe drivers, and BIOS settings are up to date or correct? That read speed does look slow.mercutio - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
Yeah checked everything. Tried googling, but lots of people using old motherboards clouding issue.Both Microsoft and Samsung NVMe drivers slow, disabled ASPM, high C states etc in BIOS, latest firmware of SSD, not sure about motherboard, but it was latest at the time. Last time I tried contacting Samsung about 10MB/sec read speeds on SSD they didn't do anything at all other than say speeds can be variable. Their support is beyond useless.
cm2187 - Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - link
Any 2TB m2 SSD on the radar?cptcolo - Saturday, July 30, 2016 - link
I tested the Samsung PM961 1TB with the following results from Crystal Disk Mark. Very impressive, overall though it looks like the Intel 750 is better.-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2817.261 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1246.530 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 447.458 MB/s [109242.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 401.962 MB/s [ 98135.3 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 1224.242 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 1145.173 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 38.463 MB/s [ 9390.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 144.299 MB/s [ 35229.2 IOPS]
Test : 1024 MiB [C: 14.3% (136.0/952.6 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/07/30 11:47:06
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 10586] (x64)
Samsung PM961 1TB (NVMe M.2)
cptcolo - Saturday, July 30, 2016 - link
I redid the test and increased the random thread count set up to 8 from 1 before (per recommendation). Results shown below. Results are closer to what I was expecting (esp the IOPS), but I think the Intel 750 is still slightly better. It will be interesting to see what the SM961 can do.-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2882.852 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1260.938 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 8) : 1137.597 MB/s [277733.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 8) : 912.272 MB/s [222722.7 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 1239.127 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 1161.739 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 39.088 MB/s [ 9543.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 144.358 MB/s [ 35243.7 IOPS]
Test : 1024 MiB [C: 14.3% (136.0/952.6 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/07/30 12:37:07
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 10586] (x64)
Samsung PM961 1TB (NVMe M.2)