Does Windows 10 have better drivers for NVMe SSDs?
It is looking like right now that the SSD 750 might turn out to be the equal of the X-25 SSD in someday popularizing NVMe SSDs.
That being said, for the end consumer I'm not sure it matters as much over a SATA SSD. After all, the typical average user probably values the 4k @QD1/2 above all else, so perhaps these PCI-E SSDs will remain a niche product, unless the price reaches near parity with SATA SSDs, which won't happen for at least a few years.
The big advantage these PCI-E SSDs have is mostly sequential and for write-intensive work.
Windows 10 is still in development. They're still trying to improve things before the release day. I'm running the 10130 build, and it has many issues. I don't think it would be wise to do any benchmarks under the current Win10 build, and may not be good even under what gets released.
Try installing the production gpu drivers. The Beta ones that are automatically installed are quite crashy because they're still working on Direct X 12 support..
Huh? Windows 10 has been rock-hard stable for me for quite a while now. Considering it's shipping a month from now, that's how it should be. Is your statement up-to-date?
Yeah - I'm running the insider preview, and I'm a bit surprised at how rough things still are. It's stable - it just that a lot of thing don't work smoothly - especially with the App store and Modern Apps. My statement is up to date.
Ignoring OS for the moment, I am not so sure about "for the end consumer I'm not sure it matters as much over a SATA SSD. After all, the typical average user probably values the 4k @QD1/2 above all else, so perhaps these PCI-E SSDs will remain a niche product, unless the price reaches near parity with SATA SSDs, which won't happen for at least a few years."
Currently most people build there own computers are for gaming or specialist use and it is a large market. The advantages of M.2 drives is not just the 4 fold increase in read or 3 fold increase in write speeds over SATA SSD (based on a SM951 VS 850 Evo) but an improved latency over these 'legacy' SSD's. So if your going to throw down £600 for a graphics card would you think twice about a 'mear' £100 more for a 512Gb SM951 VS 500Gb 850 Evo?
For me M.2 is here and now, and SATA SSD's are secondary storage drives. As I build my self very small computers, I like the storage taking up no space in the case. (although I suspect a few small heat sinks in the short term on the drives will need to be the case in a restricted air flow environment). As far as I can tell the SM951-NVMe just makes me more certain that I want it as my primary drive.
As for Win10.0.0 I notice from the Open Beta's that out the box boot support is very good and I can not imagine there being no out the box support for all M.2 type devices, after all, these are OEM for the most part.
You've got to be kidding. An order of magnitude performance increase will become a serious market driver once mainstream availability is there. It's one of those things that has to be experienced to be appreciated. There was a time when SSDs in general seemed like an exotic upgrade for the hot rodders who spent absurd amounts on their systems. Now, I wouldn't consider building a new system without one unless price was the sole priority.
There is no reason for the price gap to last beyond this year. Once the chip sets are in production with shippable firmware you're looking at mostly the same same silicon for nearly the entire product. Since prices are very much lower than when SSDs hit the market, PC OEMs aren't faced with the same marketing problems as before. (Though what would remove the final barrier would be for Microsoft to offer functionality comparable to the Apple Fusion Drive in Windows 10.) The cost of having a conventional SATA hard drive for bulk storage alongside a 256-ish GB PCIe SSD for OS and apps is far lower than when the same companies were faced with decisions on how to offer SATA SSDs.
IMHO, the mainstream market will never experience SATA SSD but instead will go direct to PCIe SSDs because that will be the first version the PC OEMs push for mainstream consumers.
I actually recently bought an XP941 to use as a boot drive and have been damn impressed; I needed all the SATA ports for a ZFS array. Even in AHCI mode, it clocked in 850 read/700 write typical, with a peak of 1100/850.
I think I'd like a 256GB SM951 + 1TB 850 EVO setup... Probably going for the latter first tho, my 2x 128GB 830 are definitely getting a little long in the tooth and ditching the games/media drive would be sweet.
Hi Kristian, the Z97 motherboard you used to test SM951 supports only up to PCIe gen2. The SM951 (both AHCI & NVMe versions) support up to PCIe x4 gen3. The sequential read & write figures are lower with the SM951 running at PCIe gen2 compared to gen3. To run SM951 at PCIe gen3 speed you will need an upcoming Intel Skylake platform, with something like Z170 chipset. Even Intel's Broadwell CPUs (like in that NUC) support up to PCIe gen2 only.
The SSD is connected directly to the CPU's PCIe lanes and Intel's CPUs have supported PCIe Gen 3 since Ivy Bridge. Skylake and 100-series chipsets will only affect the PCIe lanes coming from the PCH.
They aren't all storage transfer commands go through the PCH. Your PCIe SSDs do not connect to the CPU directly in most cases. Some enterprise grade drives do, but most consumer do not.
PCIe is PCIe regardless of whether the controller is inside the CPU or PCH. PCH merely acts as a hub for different interfaces, but ultimately it connects to the CPU as well since that is where all the processing is done.
CentOS (Actually, RH6.5 and newer) are supposed to have in the box storage drivers for NVME. It apparently doesn't follow the same naming convention (/dev/sdx) since it doesn't utilize the SCSI protocols, but the NVME protocols.
So - to check before you buy?
#modinfo nvme - should list if your kernel has built in nvme support.
if you have a drive in, check if an nvme drive is in there and is recognized
The connector looks the same as that on the old SATA SSDs found in most laptops. I've got a 2280 sized Intel 1500 SSD in my HP Folio (Haswell). Would this give me PCIe speeds?
Depends on whether HP hooked up the PCIe lanes on their M.2 connector, which I wouldn't assume without checking into it. The BIOS also needs to have NVMe support. In the most common configurations (i.e. the "B" and "M" keyings), M.2 is required to carry both SATA and 2-4 PCIe lanes, but some motherboard vendors routinely violate this and leave out one or the other. Asus drops the SATA on some of their higher-end Z97 motherboards, for example, so you can't rule out that someone else may have made the opposite tradeoff.
For that one graph on page 3, why do you divide IOPS by the standard deviation? I understand you are showing that this drive is a lot more consistent than the others, I just wonder what the mathematical intuition behind this value is.
It's just a key ratio. Standard deviation alone is a bad metric because it doesn't take the performance into account at all. It wouldn't be fair to compare stdev of a drive that does 15K IOPS against a drive that does 5K IOPS because if the two had equivalent stdev the impact would be much more severe on the slower one (e.g. frequent 50% drops in performance, whereas only 15% for the 15K IOPS drive).
Well, if competency consists of him originally presenting test results wrong in several articles, and then a reader correcting him in the comments of the 750 article, and then him adopting the correct method...well, yeah. Then that is competency. (that is what happened)
First gen. Give it time. Seems like a dedicated nvme controller (ala Intel) would improve random performance...it looks like this controller is already running near its capability in AHCI mode.
But as with everything nand, mature firmware will help
Exciting stuff. Does anyone know if current broadwell laptops can be retrofitted with nvme M.2 drives in the future? Specifically the xps 13 2015. It's a hot item with poor storage options.
That laptop, probably yes. Best place to check would be the notebookreview forums -- they should have a specific forum for that laptop and you can ask there, or see if someone has already swapped in a PCIe drive. -- You need to verify 1) That the m.2 slot is actually pcie and not just sata, and 2) that it supports nvme in the bios, but being broadwell, you can probably assume it does.
i would also like to know how cpu usage is affected it may not be of any significance with a 4790k but with a i3\i5nuc? i would also be interested to see if ram speed has any effect on such high speed ssd speed in a nuc since most people seem to buy 1600c11 sodimm for them
What is stopping us to getting a 32 Channel SSD Controller? Cost? Or we wait for 3D NAND to push to the max 3.2GB/s a PIC-E 3.0 x4 allows? What's next then? PCI-E 4.0 isn't even on the Cannonlake Roadmap. And even with the 4x PCI-E 4.0 it seems to be too little headroom for SSD. Where is the next bottleneck?
There are some 32-channel controllers in the enterprise space, but as you suspected the reason why we don't see those in the client market is cost.
Right now I would say the biggest bottleneck is software design because everything (except some enterprise applications) is still designed for high latency storage (i.e. load everything to RAM and as little disk access as possible, whereas by properly utilizing the low latency of SSDs applications performance could be improved.
OK, so a couple of things here. first, while windows 10 10130 is still a little buggy, i already have 10147 and it is rock solid. many improvements. next, i am running it on a samsung 951. boots very nice, there is no more error when restarting like there was in 10130, and things are smooth. however, it doesn't run at full speed. on crystal disk mark i get 1569 sequential read, and 1474 sequential write. and my sm951 is the ahci version. but this leads me to the BIG quesiton, since you guys said that the hardware is the same between the ahci and nvme versions, does that mean when the nvme version comes out and is sold widely, that i can download firmware to turn my ahci version into a nvme version?
These SSDs are good for driving the performance up, especially for datacenters. In home usage, I swear that a Samsung 840 PRO is gonna satisfy all your hidden performance dreams. Period.
You really didn't get the low-queue-depth-performance-and-low-latency-for-client-workloads-part, did you? I'm going to get me a few of these, as soon as they're available.
I just build new main desktop and added also a 951 AHCI version and the difference from my 840 pro to this is very noticeable, almost as from mechanic drive to a SSD all over again. I can even feel the difference from the 951 and to my 2 840 pros in raid 0. So that comment is not very professional :-)
As someone else already speculated, could we please research some more if the AHCI version can be re flashed to NVMe version ? Of course Samsung answer will be: not supported because it's OEM product, warranty void and the whole swada but I guess it's a question of getting a flash program that supports the controller EPROM they use and copy the NVMe firmware and then reflash the AHCI version. I think many would be interested in this.
I'm SO with you on that statement. My 840 Evos have been awful. TLC is not for me, and I don't care what benchies you throw at me, I won't buy TLC nand now from anybody.
Sorry, just noticed this is MLC and not TLC. Well, still going to be buyer-beware due to my last experience of slow down, firmware revisions etc with Samsung...
There's not one SSD OEM that hasn't suffered some sorta critical firmware bug, and many have suffered thru more of it than Samsung and/or hardware defects...
Crucial had some bricked drives, as did Intel using their own controller, never mind their Sandforce drive which had broken encryption, I'm more concerned about how they react and respond.
Samsung wasn't brilliant at it from what I've seen, but they did keep re issuing updates so at least they stuck with it. The fact that they ignored the non EVO (which few seem to bring up) seems the most egregious error to me.
The newest iteration of 3D TLC is quite a different animal anyway... I've had two Intel drives, two 128GB 830s, bought a 500GB 840 EVO as a gift, just bought a 1TB 850 EVO, and I'll probably get a 256GB SM951. /shrug
What the heck...? No Encryption... :/ Can anyone shed some light on this? If I remember right other manufactures coming out with NVMe will be supporting hardware based encryption. This is a deal breaker to me. Also do you think later this year we'll see a Samsung version with encryption?
Can this SM951nvme be used at full speed with asrockextreme6 z97 mobo, which has ultra m.2 slot. also the ahci model of sm951 has been sucessfully used as boot drive at full speed by many users having this mobo. And are there any drawbacks of the asrock mobo ?
They got a second drive with updated firmware, no word about an actual update, being mostly OEM drives they might've not even built in a way to update the firmware...
So, if both the AHCI and NVMe have the same hardware, do you guys reckon we'd be able to flash the NVMe firmware onto the AHCI? Or at least if Samsung feels generous enough to provide the upgrade for all AHCI owners?
If the two variants are so similar, what prevents them from being "flash" compatible? Could an intrepid hacker Download the firmware from the NVME device and overwrite the flash of the AHCI version?
So which would be best for video editing (not rendering--the editing/preview stage)? The 750 or the SM951 (AHCI since the NVMe isn't really available yet)? Generally that would mean playing back one video stream, although with compositing it can briefly get to 2 at a time. Rarely more than that though (for my videos). I'm not really sure if that would be considered random or sequential or light or heavy or what?
It's really unfortunate how much these performance line graphs squander the benchmark data you've gathered.
* One device at time prevents visual comparisons.
* One graph from a series at a time means a ton of toggling back an forth, or opening a lot of windows
* ...but, because the scale isn't fixed, you *still* can't visually compare them.
The graphs are pretty terrible over at /bench too.
* no horizontal scale labels * product/comparison mixes "less is better" and "more is better" with abandon * you have to hunt around a ton to actually get anything useful * choose *either* 2 devices and all the shared benchmarks *or* all devices that happen to have been tested under a single benchmark * links to product reviews mostly gone
These are some of the weakest visualizations of this valuable set of data I can imagine, and it makes me sad.
Ok, this is supposed to be a review to guide me what SSD to buy. I read 10 pages of performance specs and 72 more comments dealing with microseconds marginality. The fact that this drive does or does not have an AES self encrypting mechanism adering to OPAL 2 with a possible IEEE1667 extension IS IMPORTANT. IT IS A COMPLETE SHOW STOPPER if the drive cannot encrypt data. Maybe except if you are a kid playing with new toys.
So, is this SSD self encrypting ? Does it support Opal 2 Does it support the IEEE1667 extension?
Just a little FYI for anyone that runs across this article. I just purchased the Samsung 950 pro boxed consumer version in 512GB. I Installed it with an adapter card in an old Asus M4a88TD-V EVO/USB3 motherboard. To my amazement the bios recognized and even put it in the boot sequence. I already had an 830 SSD. I booted up with the old SSD 830 and initialized this new 950. Then using Samsung's transfer software cloned the 830 to the 950. Rebooted, turned the 830 to disabled in the boot order, and enabled the 950 as the boot drive. It took two tries for me to realize I had to disable the 830 in the boot menu as the bios automatically looked for a bootable AHCI drive first. I have now been booting and running the 950 Pro for over a week with no issues. This is on an old AMD 880 chipset!!! This is a PCIe 2.0 MB! Even so it still manages to outperform the older Samsung 830 SSD enough to notice. User Bench shows my SSD performance going from 70% to 169% of average. Average will shoot up much higher once I get a true PCIe MB with native NVMe drive support.
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CrazyElf - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
@Kristian VättöDoes Windows 10 have better drivers for NVMe SSDs?
It is looking like right now that the SSD 750 might turn out to be the equal of the X-25 SSD in someday popularizing NVMe SSDs.
That being said, for the end consumer I'm not sure it matters as much over a SATA SSD. After all, the typical average user probably values the 4k @QD1/2 above all else, so perhaps these PCI-E SSDs will remain a niche product, unless the price reaches near parity with SATA SSDs, which won't happen for at least a few years.
The big advantage these PCI-E SSDs have is mostly sequential and for write-intensive work.
dgingeri - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Windows 10 is still in development. They're still trying to improve things before the release day. I'm running the 10130 build, and it has many issues. I don't think it would be wise to do any benchmarks under the current Win10 build, and may not be good even under what gets released.hans_ober - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Forget performance/benchmarks, even the UI is unstable. Window manager hangs, quits app. Many issues.Flunk - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Try installing the production gpu drivers. The Beta ones that are automatically installed are quite crashy because they're still working on Direct X 12 support..Gigaplex - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
That doesn't apply in my case as I'm using a laptop with Intel graphics that aren't capable of DX12.nathanddrews - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
Not sure which Intel graphics you have, but I was successful just installing the current 7/8.1 64bit drivers.AlenChakarov - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Huh? Windows 10 has been rock-hard stable for me for quite a while now. Considering it's shipping a month from now, that's how it should be. Is your statement up-to-date?Gigaplex - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
I'm running the latest build, and I get a highly visible explorer crash every time I shut down or restart.Notmyusualid - Sunday, June 28, 2015 - link
BS.It is full of holes.
If there is one thing I've learned about software, if Microsoft say Beta, they really do mean it...
kmmatney - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Yeah - I'm running the insider preview, and I'm a bit surprised at how rough things still are. It's stable - it just that a lot of thing don't work smoothly - especially with the App store and Modern Apps. My statement is up to date.Laststop311 - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
the pci-e ssd's also improve the 4k qd1/2 as well not by huge amounts but it is faster in that as well.cenpjas - Monday, June 29, 2015 - link
Ignoring OS for the moment, I am not so sure about "for the end consumer I'm not sure it matters as much over a SATA SSD. After all, the typical average user probably values the 4k @QD1/2 above all else, so perhaps these PCI-E SSDs will remain a niche product, unless the price reaches near parity with SATA SSDs, which won't happen for at least a few years."Currently most people build there own computers are for gaming or specialist use and it is a large market. The advantages of M.2 drives is not just the 4 fold increase in read or 3 fold increase in write speeds over SATA SSD (based on a SM951 VS 850 Evo) but an improved latency over these 'legacy' SSD's. So if your going to throw down £600 for a graphics card would you think twice about a 'mear' £100 more for a 512Gb SM951 VS 500Gb 850 Evo?
For me M.2 is here and now, and SATA SSD's are secondary storage drives. As I build my self very small computers, I like the storage taking up no space in the case. (although I suspect a few small heat sinks in the short term on the drives will need to be the case in a restricted air flow environment). As far as I can tell the SM951-NVMe just makes me more certain that I want it as my primary drive.
As for Win10.0.0 I notice from the Open Beta's that out the box boot support is very good and I can not imagine there being no out the box support for all M.2 type devices, after all, these are OEM for the most part.
epobirs - Thursday, July 2, 2015 - link
You've got to be kidding. An order of magnitude performance increase will become a serious market driver once mainstream availability is there. It's one of those things that has to be experienced to be appreciated. There was a time when SSDs in general seemed like an exotic upgrade for the hot rodders who spent absurd amounts on their systems. Now, I wouldn't consider building a new system without one unless price was the sole priority.There is no reason for the price gap to last beyond this year. Once the chip sets are in production with shippable firmware you're looking at mostly the same same silicon for nearly the entire product. Since prices are very much lower than when SSDs hit the market, PC OEMs aren't faced with the same marketing problems as before. (Though what would remove the final barrier would be for Microsoft to offer functionality comparable to the Apple Fusion Drive in Windows 10.) The cost of having a conventional SATA hard drive for bulk storage alongside a 256-ish GB PCIe SSD for OS and apps is far lower than when the same companies were faced with decisions on how to offer SATA SSDs.
IMHO, the mainstream market will never experience SATA SSD but instead will go direct to PCIe SSDs because that will be the first version the PC OEMs push for mainstream consumers.
dgingeri - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
I'd still prefer my 512GB 850 Pro over this.vnangia - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Curious why? Is it just cost-related?I actually recently bought an XP941 to use as a boot drive and have been damn impressed; I needed all the SATA ports for a ZFS array. Even in AHCI mode, it clocked in 850 read/700 write typical, with a peak of 1100/850.
Notmyusualid - Sunday, June 28, 2015 - link
Sounds butt hurt to me...Impulses - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
I think I'd like a 256GB SM951 + 1TB 850 EVO setup... Probably going for the latter first tho, my 2x 128GB 830 are definitely getting a little long in the tooth and ditching the games/media drive would be sweet.scan80269 - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Hi Kristian, the Z97 motherboard you used to test SM951 supports only up to PCIe gen2. The SM951 (both AHCI & NVMe versions) support up to PCIe x4 gen3. The sequential read & write figures are lower with the SM951 running at PCIe gen2 compared to gen3. To run SM951 at PCIe gen3 speed you will need an upcoming Intel Skylake platform, with something like Z170 chipset. Even Intel's Broadwell CPUs (like in that NUC) support up to PCIe gen2 only.wyysoft - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Why can’t Z97 support PCIe Gen3? No Z170 chipset is needed to get PCIe Gen3 results.Kristian Vättö - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
The SSD is connected directly to the CPU's PCIe lanes and Intel's CPUs have supported PCIe Gen 3 since Ivy Bridge. Skylake and 100-series chipsets will only affect the PCIe lanes coming from the PCH.patrickjp93 - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
They aren't all storage transfer commands go through the PCH. Your PCIe SSDs do not connect to the CPU directly in most cases. Some enterprise grade drives do, but most consumer do not.Kristian Vättö - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
PCIe is PCIe regardless of whether the controller is inside the CPU or PCH. PCH merely acts as a hub for different interfaces, but ultimately it connects to the CPU as well since that is where all the processing is done.CajunArson - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Yeah so are we missing some sound and FURY [hint hint] about this SSD on a stick?Kristian Vättö - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Fury X is coming, Ryan just needed one more day because the flu has been undermining his ability to work.DigitalFreak - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
(hint hint) The 980ti is faster than the Fury X all around.CajunArson - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
I'm not disagreeing with that statement.I just want the review.
lilmoe - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
+1A DX12 showdown between FuryX and 980ti would be highly welcome as well.
Gigaplex - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
The Fury X wins in some of the 4k tests. The 980Ti seems faster overall, but it's not "all around".mr_tawan - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
From what I've read, it looks like the Fury has advantages when it comes to memory-intensive use case.SofS - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
About the driver issue, how do different operating systems fare? Like 32/64 bits, XP/7/8/10 and Linux old/new (for instance CentOS/Fedora).bill.rookard - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
CentOS (Actually, RH6.5 and newer) are supposed to have in the box storage drivers for NVME. It apparently doesn't follow the same naming convention (/dev/sdx) since it doesn't utilize the SCSI protocols, but the NVME protocols.So - to check before you buy?
#modinfo nvme - should list if your kernel has built in nvme support.
if you have a drive in, check if an nvme drive is in there and is recognized
#lspci | grep nvme
SofS - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Indeed, but my point was about their quality and how they compare between each other.der - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
10th comment!bernstein - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
i guess the 1tb 840 msata had either too slim margins or wasn't popular enough...still waiting for a 1tb M2 NVMe drive...
foxtrot1_1 - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
See you in December 2016, then.bernstein - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
obviously i was wrong since there also is an 1tb msata 850 evo.... now i am very curious as to why samsung doesn't have a 1tb M2 ssd!!!Kristian Vättö - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
Because all the PCIe drives use MLC NAND, which is a lower capacity die.kspirit - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
The connector looks the same as that on the old SATA SSDs found in most laptops. I've got a 2280 sized Intel 1500 SSD in my HP Folio (Haswell). Would this give me PCIe speeds?foxtrot1_1 - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
No.Metaluna - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Depends on whether HP hooked up the PCIe lanes on their M.2 connector, which I wouldn't assume without checking into it. The BIOS also needs to have NVMe support. In the most common configurations (i.e. the "B" and "M" keyings), M.2 is required to carry both SATA and 2-4 PCIe lanes, but some motherboard vendors routinely violate this and leave out one or the other. Asus drops the SATA on some of their higher-end Z97 motherboards, for example, so you can't rule out that someone else may have made the opposite tradeoff.kspirit - Saturday, June 27, 2015 - link
Thank you, I appreciate the response. I'll check it out :)fastfood8891 - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
@Kristian VättöFor that one graph on page 3, why do you divide IOPS by the standard deviation? I understand you are showing that this drive is a lot more consistent than the others, I just wonder what the mathematical intuition behind this value is.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
It's just a key ratio. Standard deviation alone is a bad metric because it doesn't take the performance into account at all. It wouldn't be fair to compare stdev of a drive that does 15K IOPS against a drive that does 5K IOPS because if the two had equivalent stdev the impact would be much more severe on the slower one (e.g. frequent 50% drops in performance, whereas only 15% for the 15K IOPS drive).krumme - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
Enjoy this man guys while we have him. This is competence at its finest.JellyRoll - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Well, if competency consists of him originally presenting test results wrong in several articles, and then a reader correcting him in the comments of the 750 article, and then him adopting the correct method...well, yeah. Then that is competency. (that is what happened)fastfood8891 - Saturday, June 27, 2015 - link
makes sense, thank you for the explanation.Samus - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
First gen. Give it time. Seems like a dedicated nvme controller (ala Intel) would improve random performance...it looks like this controller is already running near its capability in AHCI mode.But as with everything nand, mature firmware will help
willis936 - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Exciting stuff. Does anyone know if current broadwell laptops can be retrofitted with nvme M.2 drives in the future? Specifically the xps 13 2015. It's a hot item with poor storage options.extide - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
That laptop, probably yes. Best place to check would be the notebookreview forums -- they should have a specific forum for that laptop and you can ask there, or see if someone has already swapped in a PCIe drive. -- You need to verify 1) That the m.2 slot is actually pcie and not just sata, and 2) that it supports nvme in the bios, but being broadwell, you can probably assume it does.lilmoe - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Is there any tangible difference in CPU utilization using NVMe? Would be nice if there was a graph...Dasa2 - Monday, June 29, 2015 - link
i would also like to know how cpu usage is affectedit may not be of any significance with a 4790k but with a i3\i5nuc?
i would also be interested to see if ram speed has any effect on such high speed ssd speed in a nuc since most people seem to buy 1600c11 sodimm for them
iwod - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
What is stopping us to getting a 32 Channel SSD Controller?Cost? Or we wait for 3D NAND to push to the max 3.2GB/s a PIC-E 3.0 x4 allows?
What's next then? PCI-E 4.0 isn't even on the Cannonlake Roadmap.
And even with the 4x PCI-E 4.0 it seems to be too little headroom for SSD.
Where is the next bottleneck?
Kristian Vättö - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
There are some 32-channel controllers in the enterprise space, but as you suspected the reason why we don't see those in the client market is cost.Right now I would say the biggest bottleneck is software design because everything (except some enterprise applications) is still designed for high latency storage (i.e. load everything to RAM and as little disk access as possible, whereas by properly utilizing the low latency of SSDs applications performance could be improved.
stevae - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
OK, so a couple of things here. first, while windows 10 10130 is still a little buggy, i already have 10147 and it is rock solid. many improvements. next, i am running it on a samsung 951. boots very nice, there is no more error when restarting like there was in 10130, and things are smooth. however, it doesn't run at full speed. on crystal disk mark i get 1569 sequential read, and 1474 sequential write. and my sm951 is the ahci version. but this leads me to the BIG quesiton, since you guys said that the hardware is the same between the ahci and nvme versions, does that mean when the nvme version comes out and is sold widely, that i can download firmware to turn my ahci version into a nvme version?yeeeeman - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
These SSDs are good for driving the performance up, especially for datacenters. In home usage, I swear that a Samsung 840 PRO is gonna satisfy all your hidden performance dreams. Period.JKJK - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
You really didn't get the low-queue-depth-performance-and-low-latency-for-client-workloads-part, did you?I'm going to get me a few of these, as soon as they're available.
Shinzon - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
I just build new main desktop and added also a 951 AHCI version and the difference from my 840 pro to this is very noticeable, almost as from mechanic drive to a SSD all over again. I can even feel the difference from the 951 and to my 2 840 pros in raid 0. So that comment is not very professional :-)Shinzon - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
@ Kristian VättöAs someone else already speculated, could we please research some more if the AHCI version can be re flashed to NVMe version ? Of course Samsung answer will be: not supported because it's OEM product, warranty void and the whole swada but I guess it's a question of getting a flash program that supports the controller EPROM they use and copy the NVMe firmware and then reflash the AHCI version. I think many would be interested in this.
Tack för dina altid fina reviews :-)
dcaxax - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
Two words about Samsung SSD's. Never. Again.stevae - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
yeah, why would you. they only lead the ssd world 95% of the time. sure, you go ahead and stick with that ocz crap.Notmyusualid - Sunday, June 28, 2015 - link
I'm SO with you on that statement. My 840 Evos have been awful. TLC is not for me, and I don't care what benchies you throw at me, I won't buy TLC nand now from anybody.Notmyusualid - Sunday, June 28, 2015 - link
Sorry, just noticed this is MLC and not TLC. Well, still going to be buyer-beware due to my last experience of slow down, firmware revisions etc with Samsung...Impulses - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
There's not one SSD OEM that hasn't suffered some sorta critical firmware bug, and many have suffered thru more of it than Samsung and/or hardware defects...Crucial had some bricked drives, as did Intel using their own controller, never mind their Sandforce drive which had broken encryption, I'm more concerned about how they react and respond.
Samsung wasn't brilliant at it from what I've seen, but they did keep re issuing updates so at least they stuck with it. The fact that they ignored the non EVO (which few seem to bring up) seems the most egregious error to me.
The newest iteration of 3D TLC is quite a different animal anyway... I've had two Intel drives, two 128GB 830s, bought a 500GB 840 EVO as a gift, just bought a 1TB 850 EVO, and I'll probably get a 256GB SM951. /shrug
Romney4President - Friday, June 26, 2015 - link
What the heck...? No Encryption... :/ Can anyone shed some light on this? If I remember right other manufactures coming out with NVMe will be supporting hardware based encryption. This is a deal breaker to me. Also do you think later this year we'll see a Samsung version with encryption?Perk5 - Monday, June 29, 2015 - link
Can this SM951nvme be used at full speed with asrockextreme6 z97 mobo, which has ultra m.2 slot. also the ahci model of sm951 has been sucessfully used as boot drive at full speed by many users having this mobo. And are there any drawbacks of the asrock mobo ?boe - Tuesday, June 30, 2015 - link
Just bring on those 10TB and 32TB SSD drives. I need them like yesterday.JKJK - Sunday, July 12, 2015 - link
It seems that there is a firmware update that makes the drive handle fua more effectively:http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-sm951-nvme-m-2...
Impulses - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
They got a second drive with updated firmware, no word about an actual update, being mostly OEM drives they might've not even built in a way to update the firmware...JoKO4184 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
So, if both the AHCI and NVMe have the same hardware, do you guys reckon we'd be able to flash the NVMe firmware onto the AHCI? Or at least if Samsung feels generous enough to provide the upgrade for all AHCI owners?caelumtech - Thursday, August 27, 2015 - link
If the two variants are so similar, what prevents them from being "flash" compatible? Could an intrepid hacker Download the firmware from the NVME device and overwrite the flash of the AHCI version?bigbrainz - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
So which would be best for video editing (not rendering--the editing/preview stage)? The 750 or the SM951 (AHCI since the NVMe isn't really available yet)? Generally that would mean playing back one video stream, although with compositing it can briefly get to 2 at a time. Rarely more than that though (for my videos). I'm not really sure if that would be considered random or sequential or light or heavy or what?THANKS!!!!
metaxis - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
It's really unfortunate how much these performance line graphs squander the benchmark data you've gathered.* One device at time prevents visual comparisons.
* One graph from a series at a time means a ton of toggling back an forth, or opening a lot of windows
* ...but, because the scale isn't fixed, you *still* can't visually compare them.
The graphs are pretty terrible over at /bench too.
* no horizontal scale labels
* product/comparison mixes "less is better" and "more is better" with abandon
* you have to hunt around a ton to actually get anything useful
* choose *either* 2 devices and all the shared benchmarks *or* all devices that happen to have been tested under a single benchmark
* links to product reviews mostly gone
These are some of the weakest visualizations of this valuable set of data I can imagine, and it makes me sad.
dtscaps - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link
Ok, this is supposed to be a review to guide me what SSD to buy. I read 10 pages of performance specs and 72 more comments dealing with microseconds marginality. The fact that this drive does or does not have an AES self encrypting mechanism adering to OPAL 2 with a possible IEEE1667 extension IS IMPORTANT. IT IS A COMPLETE SHOW STOPPER if the drive cannot encrypt data. Maybe except if you are a kid playing with new toys.So, is this SSD self encrypting ?
Does it support Opal 2
Does it support the IEEE1667 extension?
Chris023 - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
Just a little FYI for anyone that runs across this article. I just purchased the Samsung 950 pro boxed consumer version in 512GB. I Installed it with an adapter card in an old Asus M4a88TD-V EVO/USB3 motherboard. To my amazement the bios recognized and even put it in the boot sequence. I already had an 830 SSD. I booted up with the old SSD 830 and initialized this new 950. Then using Samsung's transfer software cloned the 830 to the 950. Rebooted, turned the 830 to disabled in the boot order, and enabled the 950 as the boot drive. It took two tries for me to realize I had to disable the 830 in the boot menu as the bios automatically looked for a bootable AHCI drive first. I have now been booting and running the 950 Pro for over a week with no issues. This is on an old AMD 880 chipset!!! This is a PCIe 2.0 MB! Even so it still manages to outperform the older Samsung 830 SSD enough to notice. User Bench shows my SSD performance going from 70% to 169% of average. Average will shoot up much higher once I get a true PCIe MB with native NVMe drive support.