Your system is only as fast as the slowest component.
Honestly, ever since the original x-25 the only performance metric I've found to have a real world impact on system performance (aside from large file transfers) with regards to boot times, games, and applications is the random write speed of a drive.
If a drive has solid sustained random write speed, your system will seem to be much more responsive in most of my usage scenarios.
950 pro kind of failed to impress in this dept as far as I'm concerned. While i am glad to see the technology moving in this direction, I was really looking for a generational leap here with this product, which didn't seem to happen, at least not across the board.
Unfortunately I think i will hold off on any purchases until i see the technology mature another generation or two, but hey if you are a water-cooling company, there is a market opportunity for you here.
Looks like until some further die shrinks happen nvme is going to be HOT.
>> > Your system is only as fast as the slowest component. >Uhh no. Each component serves a different purpose.
Memory, CPU, and I/O resources need to be balanced if you want to reach maximum utilization for a given workload. See "Amdahl's Law". Saying that it's "only as fast as the slowest component" may be a gross over-simplification, but it's not entirely wrong.
I find it odd that random access and IOPS haven't improved. Power consumption has gone up too.
I'm excited for PCIe and NVMe going mainstream, but I'm concerned the kinks haven't quite been ironed out yet. Still, at the end of the day, if I were building a computer today with all new parts, this would surely be what I'd put in it. Er, well maybe -- Samsung's reliability hasn't been great as of late.
SSD speed increases come mostly from increased parallelism. You divide up the the 10 MB file into 32 chunks and write them simultaneously, instead of 16 chunks.
Random access benchmarks are typically done with the smallest possible chunk (4k) thus eliminating any benefits from parallel processing. The Anandtech benchmarks are a bit deceptive because they average QD=1, 2, 4 (queue depth of 1, 2, and 4 parallel data read/writes). But at least the graphs show the speed at each QD. You can see the 4k random read speed at QD=1 is the same as most SATA SSDs.
It's interesting the 4k random write speeds have improved substantially (30 MB/s read, 70 MB/s write is typical in SATA SSDs). I'd be interested in an in-depth Anandtech feature delving into why reads seem to be stuck at below 50 MB/s, while writes are approaching 200 MB/s. Is there a RAM write-cache on the SSD and the drive is "cheating" by reporting the data as written when it's only been queued in the cache? Whereas reads still have to wait for completion of the measurement of the voltage on the individual NAND cells?
It is likely samsung is holding random access back artificially, so that they don't cannibalize their enterprise market. A simple software change, a rebrand and you can sell the same hardware at much higher profit margins.
It is possible to do performance fixing, but not likely in this case. Enterprise hardware should generally concentrate on endurance, probably using different binning and better memory. I'm sure they can beef up the drivers too and optimize for certain loads. In general they'll get the most sales by selling in greater numbers. Artificially limiting performance so they can make more profit margin on some (much smaller quantities) hardware being sold to enterprise doesn't make sense.
Yes, there is a DRAM cache. The size of it is listed in the table on the first page of the article.
Without this, random writes would still be horrible, as overwriting a complete 128KB block whenever the drive is supposed to write down just 4KB leads quickly to the need of reading, deleting & re-writing the blocks, as no unused 128KB-blocks are left.
The DRAM cache is not used to cache writes. It's large size is mainly for the NAND mapping table. If writes where cached in DRAM the performance of 4KB random writes would of course be waaay higher than what it is. And quite extreme dataloss would occur in case of power loss.
Considering most people only the system once per day, the wait should not be considered an issue. If one BOOTs the machine many times per day, S3 sleep is a quick way back to the desktop.
Even if I only boot my computer once per day, the time spent waiting for it to boot is annoying and I consider boot times important for that reason. When there is little other user-perceivable difference in SSD drives, a boot that happens 3 or 4 seconds faster is a significant factor.
This is called being enthusiastic about the wrong thing. If getting to the desktop matters that much to one's productivity, then using S3 resume would be the "logical" thing to do.
Actually shame on you for telling others what their priorities should be. Boot times are Very important to me and was one of the main reasons I upgraded from a hdd to a ssd in the first place. I dont want to have to wait more than the 15 seconds it takes my system to boot right now. People have to boot/restart their machine for various reasons and variable amounts of times, I dont want to have to wait more than 20 sec or so Every time I update software/drivers that require a reboot (windows update, gpu driver update, etc.). Almost every time I leave my house for more than 8 hrs or so I shut down my machine, I just dont have good luck with sleep on it, not sure if it's because of the radeon or what but ehh.
LOL!!! You are one Hilarious (my most polite way of saying pathetic) character. If you had any clue as to how much I Actually earn for my time, from all my various ventures especially my business, your ugly little smiles at the end of all your comments would more accurately be portrayed with a symbol that expressed your jaw wide open and hitting the floor. : 0 And how many times are you going to mention S3, lol, let me guess it's something you just recently learned about so you spout off about it Every single chance you get. Please don't reply to my comments in the future. I come here for intelligent interactions, not some nonsense from someone that has No Clue. Thank You in advance, Oh and just for you ;)
SunnyNW, I never met one single person who made a shitload of money "with their time" who spent that time arguing online on tech sites, and arguing trivialities like SSD boot times—congrats, you’re the first!
No person I know that makes $150+/hour gives a shit about boot times, and the people who do (working in IT, specifically high availability infrastructure ops) are in a whole different market from the one that AnandTech usually covers.
You are entitled to your opinion. But I agree, this was the first time I made a reference to my personal life finances thru comments and there is no need for that here. I just become Very annoyed when one judges others' priorities and I was already upset from other bs. Anyway not one of my finer moments.
Lastly Ill add that 'making wrong assumptions' (especially when insulting) and 'questioning others priorities' are my pet peeves. On any other site I would not have replied in the first place. I dont know why but I feel differently when it comes to anandtechs community, I feel there is a higher standard here and many of the comments are usually very informative and worthwhile discussions. I work extremely hard and do not need someone telling me how much my time is worth. I hate when people sit behind their computer making assumptions about someone that they know absolutely nothing of, I do not expect that from the community here. I highly respect most of the commenters on anandtech and would like that in return. I feel anandtech is full of mostly intellectual persons. There are not many commenters on anandtech like mr. gill and I just let him get to me way more than I should have. Again I shouldnt have to explain myself to you but iunno here I am doing just that...I just turned 22 recently so gimme a beak, I'm learning.
If the sleep issues are due to the Radeon and BOOT time is that important, then perhaps a S3 resume complaint VGA would get you back to the desktop quicker. ;)
Working in IT the most annoying thing is boot times on OTHERS machines. I still run into spinning drives and insufficient memory which could be upwards of 10 minutes before performance stabilizes after a reboot.
I have an IT service company and have been doing IT for a few decades. I am with you on how incredibly annoying it is to work on some of the hodge podge of hardware that comes in for service. Specifically there are those that refuse to upgrade early P4's or Sempron single core systems with 512 or 256 megs of RAM. Certainly these should have failed by now. They barely run XP let alone modern security needed to protect them. Internally all our workstations are Z97, X99, x79, Z170's with 4690K's, 4790K's, 5930K, 3930K and 6700K CPUs. Every machine has a Samsung or Intel SSD for a boot drive and a Hitachi 4, 5 or 6TB drive for work and storage. All systems also have 16 or 32GB RAM. I am just amazed at how much time the average person wastes waiting on an entry level PC to do things. I mean many of us spend in excess of 40 hours a week at a keyboard. I get much more done when I keep my equipment in tip top shape and fresh. Nothing has a chance to break down. Many companies throw tons of money at "image" but internally the infrastructure is held together with bubble gum and band aids. Oh BTW, I got our first 950 Pro 512MB Yesterday :-)
@Deders: "Until Samsung announce again that SSD's are not meant to use sleep, their excuse for computers with 830/840's freezing for 30 seconds after waking up."
Is this a known issue or are you just speculating about what might (probably?) occur in the future? I am using quite a few 830s and have deployed quite a few more all (up to this point) without this issue. In my experience, they've been some of the most reliable drives I've used. I know of a few 840s without issues as well, but I've tried to avoid them as much as practical as I'm still not convinced the industry fully understands the long term consequences of simultaneously increasing leakage and cutting down the margin of error to get that third (fourth, fifth, etc.) bit in. I suspect it'll be fine on some (larger) process nodes, but the 840EVO issues suggests that there is a lower limit to how small you can get while trying to get that extra bit (and storing long term). In any case, it would be nice to know if there is something I should be looking out for here and whether practical mitigations exist.
Agreed. I have several systems with the 830s in them and have zero problems with them. I avoided the 840s because those went with the TLC and I was iffy about them, and the 830s are rock solid and very fast.
I'd say the most annoying part is the Windows boot logo is a fixed time to complete. So even if Windows 7 8 10 boot up faster it still waits for the pretty video.
Turn it off from msconfig and windows 7 on 850 will boot in 3 seconds instead of 10 seconds
I'm from the era of overclocking with jumpers on a motherboard and far longer post times. If waiting 10 seconds for a machine to boot is too long while trying to get a stable overclock then do it in windows. Or does everyone in this generation have ADD?
If they updated their baseline every time new tech came out then they would be so busy retesting to have comparable results, that we would never see a new review ever again.
Thanks geniekid! That review is far more valuable than what we have here on AT. AT said "loading a new level in a video game would be more likely to show noticeable difference from better performance here". More likely, huh. Then you go look at the actual data at techreport and find there's nearly zero difference. When will AT learn to measure an SSD in an actually useful way?
Game load times are actually the least sensitive to SSD speeds. Even a 15 year old game like Red Alert 2 with a next to zero RAM footprint certainly doesn't load instantly on a Crucial M550, much less current titles.
VERY interesting. Of particular note is the Crucial MX200 - an older drive, and connected via SATA which trades blows back and forth with the newer PCIe - nvme based drives. Wow, good stuff.
Why would you go on about how awesome Skylake and the 100 series chipset are for PCIe connected drives and then use a Haswell chip and a Z97 board for the test rig? Time to go back to the bench.
The Haswell system is what I've got on hand to test with, and it's what allows my results to be directly comparable with the reviews from earlier this year.
Skylake gives you PCIe 3 from the PCH, but on the testbed we always use an x16 slot directly off the CPU for PCIe SSDs, so we don't need Skylake to run the drive at PCIe 3 speeds.
This is not a SATA controller we're talking about, it's PCIe. And there we have hardly seen any differences between different implementations over the years.
May I humbly request an addition to the review to show performance AND issues when using a PCI Express 2.0 to M.2 adapter on an older platform like the P67A?
If I'd had more time, I probably would have done more informal testing on some older machines. I can at least assure you that the drive doesn't seem to have any trouble in a PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 slot on my personal Haswell machine. Next time I'm poking around in my Lynnfield server I'll be checking how the pcie drives work, especially power management. But I probably won't do a full suite of performance tests, just enough to get a rough idea for how fast drives perform on a slower link. And I really don't have a clue when I'll get around to this, because I've still got quite the backlog of drives to review.
Thermal throttling is disappointing but shows that M.2, like SATA Express, is DOA. PCIe drives with heatsinks, or preferably U.2, is the future - hopefully with the Z200 series chipsets, manufacturers will ditch SATAe in favour of U.2 and we can finally get a worthy successor to SATA3.
DOA it certainly is not. You're free to attach a tiny RAM heatsink on the drive and be fine. Or simply forget about throtteling in real world usage (unless you use it in a server).
Under a normal client workload you don't get anywhere near triggering the thermal protection so adding heat sinks is not required. Agree SATA Express was still born. M.2 is far from it, if you look at any new release ultrabook you will find a M.2 SSD under the lid.
M.2 is a great solution for replacing 2.5" SSDs in space-limited applications like ultrabooks, but for *absolute maximum performance without thermal throttling*, 2.5" U.2 drives a la Intel's 750 are still the way to go.
It depends on the designer on how much throttling they would allow or not. U.2 allows more freedom though but I reckon would be much more expensive and less dense in the future.
Why everyone keep saying that BIOS/UEFI must support NVMe to boot into OS?
You can install GRUB bootloader on cheap small USB flash drive and use it to boot from NVMe drives on any system, since GRUB itself supports NVMe for few years now. And yes, GRUB supports booting into Windows 8.1 / 10.
They say it because it's true. Nobody wants to have to manage a USB drive just for booting their system. You can also install a floppy drive and boot from that, would you recommend that also? How about keeping a separate computer up constantly to support PXE booting from the network? Would you recommend that level of headache to someone who just wants to boot their frickin computer?
By the way, of all of the things I have to deal with when installing/upgrading Linux systems, grub is the most painful and problematic, by MANY orders of magnitude. I would *NEVER* recommend that a non-technical user have anything to do with grub, especially not for something as silly as booting a PC into Windows off of an NVMe drive.
Yeah, just buy Skylake motherboard, CPU and DDR4 RAM.
And I'm not saying that it's simple, I'm saying that it's possible. You don't have to do anything special after setting it up, just keep small USB drive plugged in at the back of your PC.
windows shouldn't be able to mess with it if grub is installed on an external usb drive, and then setting the usb drive as the main boot device(all bios i've seen supports this). it's called chainloading, and it's not a bad hack if you don't have all the proper hardware but still want to try it. of course, it will require some technical knowledge. and because i'm poor, and can't afford a new system, if it works, it's good enough.
It didn't take much to figure out how to insert the nvme modules into a z87 motherboard. However I was prepared to replace it with a z97 if it messed up. I was NOT even considering the 600+ to go to skylake.
The problem with that theoretical solution (which i've tried) is that windows won't let you install on it when it lists the disk drives.
If you migrate an installation from a sata drive, you get a bsod upon restart due to the different ahci/nvme drive required similar to the ahci/ide for sata drives.
What you're proposing isn't actually booting the drive. It's chainloading. The assessment is accurate, and chainloading is a long standing practice for this type of problem. It's also a hack that has no business being used for general consumer usage.
does the supplied samsung driver work with Win7, and is its use as simple as pointing the windows installer to a USB thumbdrive at the appropriate point?
The Samsung NVMe driver was provided as an installer program. After running the installer, there was no need to explicitly change which NVMe driver was used for the 950 Pro. I tested it on Windows 7, 8.1, and 10.
If your usage is "normal" for a desktop, I suspect "no" is the answer. Unless you're doing a side-by-side comparison. Watch the disk drive LED on your machine. If it's glowing constantly you're being limited by the storage, otherwise not. Or look at the drive load in task manager (shown since Win 8).
>For starters, the 950 Pro's power consumption increases as it heats up, and I've seen its idle power climb by as much as 4.5% from power on to equilibrium.
Er, yeah, that's how typical transistors work... they get leakier as they heat up :\
What is the latency difference between having this ssd connected directly to the cpu, and through the pch? I'm very curious but no one has tested this.
Does it suffer from similar thermal throttling issues as it's predecessors (SM951 and XP941)? I have seen people putting a heat sink on these and they report improvement in sustained performance.
This 5,600-word review utterly fails to penetrate to the bottom-line answer: the 950 Pro gives virtually zero desktop-usage performance advantage, while costing more than double of SATAIII drives. That only took 17 words.
I don't want to believe you tested a PCIe 3.0 4x drive on a board with a PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 socket, so I'm guessing you used some kind of PCIe card adapter hooked up to the 3.0 lanes from de CPU, right?
I'm just impressed with the SM951. All these PCIe drives are not terrible and gives excellent performance over SATA anyway. Their differences are pretty negligible in real world use. The challenge now (esp. for Samsung) is more capacity and lower prices.
I can't shake the idea of NAS devices with M.2 drives.
Additionally, NVMe doesn't improve much for the clients. It seems like a specification they added on consumer drives to increase its adoption to benefit their server/enterprise storage products.
How fast do you really need to be happy with using a computer is my question , my computer is faster now than i actually need it to be and all it has is a current SSD .
I have a system with Asus X99 DeLuxe motherboard and a I7-5960X cpu. I use a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD connected to one of the SATA ports, but I want to upgrade this device to a M.2 Samsung 950 Pro. The motherboard offers two ways to connect a M.2 but I don't know witch is the best alternative. The X99 has a on-board M.2 (socket3) but is also delivered with a expansion card, a 'HYPER M.2 x4' card. Anyone who can help me with the best (fastest) solution to my problem?
How did you get on with this 950 Pro SSD on the X99 Deluxe? Can you boot from it? I am tempted to buy this SSD but have seen a lot of forums where people are having trouble. I want to install and boot Win 10 Pro from it.
Hmmmm ... the Samsung Galaxy review was at the top for 5 days, then one day for an ASUS mother board, and only one day for the Surface 4, and now several days for the Samsung PCie SSD.
Usually content is only released on weekdays, so reviews that go up later in the week (e.g. on Thursday) may get several days of page time. Oftentimes the content release is dictated by an embargo lift, so the time of publishing isn't on AnandTech's hands.
I can assure you that this is just a coincidence - there's no rule or contract that a certain company must get X number of days at the top. Frankly, it wasn't even something we thought about during my time at AnandTech as content always went up when it was ready and free for publishing.
I case anybody is interested, Amazon.com has this lovely items for sale (pre-order) right now. The Amazon web site says the product will be released for sale on Thursday, October 29th. Hurry up before they're all gone - LOL! Beagle
The 950 PRO, just like all Samsung client SSDs, do journaling to protect the FTL against sudden power losses. Protection for cached user data is not really needed since modern file systems have been designed to withstand minor data losses (HDDs also use DRAM to cache writes, so SSDs are no different in that sense).
If you really need it FXi there is always the announced Samsung SM953 drive. It's 110mm long due to the inclusion of the tantalum capacitors, otherwise it's very similar to the SM951... http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global/file/i...
I slipstreamed that hotfix (and almost 200 other fixes) using NTLite to a Win7SP1 image, wrote it back to usb, booted and it would still not allow me to install to a 951 NVMe drive... no drives found.
Has anybody got this to work?
Windows 10 installs just fine but I have an unused W7 Pro license and I would really like to use it to active a W10 install.
I hear the next version of W10 will activate directly from W7 licenses... but hopefully that'll arrive in time before the W10 will really want the activation. Or perhaps re-arming to extend a bit?
Yes it works but you need to integrate it in boot.wim as well. I made some details here about it, also nothing an errors that MS is still to fix in that KB article. Even though I reported it a long time ago: http://www.overclock.net/t/1543242/found-samsung-s...
I've read the review and others and I guess I don't see a reason to get one of these drives yet. Am I missing something? It seems that the real world performance doesn't justify the nearly twice the cost as other Samsung SATA drives. I was really hoping that the rated speeds would translate into actual real world performance, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
Get two 950 in RAID 0. I'm currently running that and it's amazing. What you should put money on depends on your needs though. For gaming SSD is not very important. But I already run 6700k with fast memory and 980TI SLI so was a logical next step.
1TB of superfast SSD is the last bit. HDD for storage, power options to shut the HDD down when idle (silent) and online backup for important data is the way I like...
Pondering whether to get a 950 Pro 256GB for a SkyLake laptop (MSI GE72 6QF). Despite the glowing benchmark results, it looks as if there would be little gain for real world usage compared to, say, an 850 EVO M.2 which is way cheaper (132 UKP for 500GB, vs. 147 UKP for 950 Pro 256GB), uses less power and thus would afford longer battery life. Edging towards the 850 EVO despite my nerdy addiction to speed...
I bought 950 pro but i having trouble rate. My system test results as follows:836 / 806 MB/s read/write. My system: Asus Z97m plus, 2*8 Corsair 2400 Mhz. i5-4690K, Corsair h110i, 1000W PSU.
I have Asus Z97 deluxe with m.2 slot, but supporting only x4 PCI 2.0 (instead of x4 PCi 3.0). So on my mobo and yours too this m.2 support only 1.0Gbit or 1.000MB.;(
I think (and asking) that with PCIe adapter i and you can put that in x8 lanes of PCI 2.0 and get full spedd with that? I have only one graphics card so this is the only way, or?
Beware! This drive (950 Pro / 512 GB) is terribly slow, if you set your disk to be "compressed" in Win7/10. I used it save my vmware space for years with other SSD drives (intel/samsung/ocz) and never had an issue. But yesterday, we got 2x nvme 950 pro and found, that speed is dropping almost immediately to ... 3 MB/s with huge latency.
I don't know, how their firmware goes around benchmarks (which are all cool for 'incompressible' data) but for real life - this drive get a HUGE hit when OS compress data.
ps. sure, I have plenty CPU for it, so it's not the case.
Be aware the new Samsung NVMe driver 1.1 drops performance by about 10% across the board. They should update the article with new perf numbers as its giving a false impression ATM.
Just a little FYI for anyone that runs across this article. I'm planning a new build later this year so buy components I can use now toward that end. 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. This doesn't represent everyday usage but it does say what the potential is. Average will shoot up much higher once I get a true PCIe MB with native NVMe drive support. Should work nicely with a Z170 based MB. One more note is I'm using the Samsung NVMe driver and not the native Windows 10 driver.
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Der2 - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Wow. The 950. A BEAST in the performance SHEETS.ddriver - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Sequential performance is very good, but I wonder how come random access shows to significant improvements.dsumanik - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Your system is only as fast as the slowest component.Honestly, ever since the original x-25 the only performance metric I've found to have a real world impact on system performance (aside from large file transfers) with regards to boot times, games, and applications is the random write speed of a drive.
If a drive has solid sustained random write speed, your system will seem to be much more responsive in most of my usage scenarios.
950 pro kind of failed to impress in this dept as far as I'm concerned. While i am glad to see the technology moving in this direction, I was really looking for a generational leap here with this product, which didn't seem to happen, at least not across the board.
Unfortunately I think i will hold off on any purchases until i see the technology mature another generation or two, but hey if you are a water-cooling company, there is a market opportunity for you here.
Looks like until some further die shrinks happen nvme is going to be HOT.
AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
> Your system is only as fast as the slowest component.Uhh no. Each component serves a different purpose.
cdillon - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
>> > Your system is only as fast as the slowest component.>Uhh no. Each component serves a different purpose.
Memory, CPU, and I/O resources need to be balanced if you want to reach maximum utilization for a given workload. See "Amdahl's Law". Saying that it's "only as fast as the slowest component" may be a gross over-simplification, but it's not entirely wrong.
xenol - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
It still highly depends on the application. If my workload is purely CPU based, then all I have to do is get the best CPU.I mean, for a jack-of-all-trades computer, sure. But I find that sort of computer silly.
xype - Monday, October 26, 2015 - link
Your response makes no sense.III-V - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I find it odd that random access and IOPS haven't improved. Power consumption has gone up too.I'm excited for PCIe and NVMe going mainstream, but I'm concerned the kinks haven't quite been ironed out yet. Still, at the end of the day, if I were building a computer today with all new parts, this would surely be what I'd put in it. Er, well maybe -- Samsung's reliability hasn't been great as of late.
Solandri - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
SSD speed increases come mostly from increased parallelism. You divide up the the 10 MB file into 32 chunks and write them simultaneously, instead of 16 chunks.Random access benchmarks are typically done with the smallest possible chunk (4k) thus eliminating any benefits from parallel processing. The Anandtech benchmarks are a bit deceptive because they average QD=1, 2, 4 (queue depth of 1, 2, and 4 parallel data read/writes). But at least the graphs show the speed at each QD. You can see the 4k random read speed at QD=1 is the same as most SATA SSDs.
It's interesting the 4k random write speeds have improved substantially (30 MB/s read, 70 MB/s write is typical in SATA SSDs). I'd be interested in an in-depth Anandtech feature delving into why reads seem to be stuck at below 50 MB/s, while writes are approaching 200 MB/s. Is there a RAM write-cache on the SSD and the drive is "cheating" by reporting the data as written when it's only been queued in the cache? Whereas reads still have to wait for completion of the measurement of the voltage on the individual NAND cells?
ddriver - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
It is likely samsung is holding random access back artificially, so that they don't cannibalize their enterprise market. A simple software change, a rebrand and you can sell the same hardware at much higher profit margins.Gigaplex - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
It's unlikely Samsung is holding back, as the phenomenon is affecting all brands.ddriver - Monday, October 26, 2015 - link
Corporations do price fixing, why not performance fixing.niva - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
It is possible to do performance fixing, but not likely in this case. Enterprise hardware should generally concentrate on endurance, probably using different binning and better memory. I'm sure they can beef up the drivers too and optimize for certain loads. In general they'll get the most sales by selling in greater numbers. Artificially limiting performance so they can make more profit margin on some (much smaller quantities) hardware being sold to enterprise doesn't make sense.That all being said I guess it is possible.
ShieTar - Monday, October 26, 2015 - link
Yes, there is a DRAM cache. The size of it is listed in the table on the first page of the article.Without this, random writes would still be horrible, as overwriting a complete 128KB block whenever the drive is supposed to write down just 4KB leads quickly to the need of reading, deleting & re-writing the blocks, as no unused 128KB-blocks are left.
Laststop311 - Tuesday, October 27, 2015 - link
its just part of how nand cells works. If you need faster speed 3d xpoint is coming to save the day.Per Hansson - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
The DRAM cache is not used to cache writes.It's large size is mainly for the NAND mapping table.
If writes where cached in DRAM the performance of 4KB random writes would of course be waaay higher than what it is.
And quite extreme dataloss would occur in case of power loss.
virtualbigd - Wednesday, December 16, 2015 - link
Can you elaborate on your reliability point above, for Samsung?virtualbigd - Wednesday, December 16, 2015 - link
I know about 840 EVO, is there something else?Samus - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I have my reservations over Samsung drives, especially since the 840 EVO, but DAMN.jay401 - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
Hey if you turn that V upside down, you have the first A-NAND SSD. :DAntDX316 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
we need REAL-WORLD performance than synthetic benchmarksthis is like how it is with DDR speeds but they do absolutely like nothing even though bandwidth is like 10x in spread difference
SmashingTool - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
" and in order to boot from an NVMe drive your motherborad's firmware needs NVMe support."^ Typo
Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Fixed! Thanks :)todlerix - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
How fast does the system boot with the 950 pros? I read the NVMe slows boot times down by a huge amount.Rajinder Gill - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Considering most people only the system once per day, the wait should not be considered an issue. If one BOOTs the machine many times per day, S3 sleep is a quick way back to the desktop.Rajinder Gill - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
*Considering most people only BOOT the system once per day, the wait should not be considered an issue.bji - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Even if I only boot my computer once per day, the time spent waiting for it to boot is annoying and I consider boot times important for that reason. When there is little other user-perceivable difference in SSD drives, a boot that happens 3 or 4 seconds faster is a significant factor.Makaveli - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
You know whats equally annoying people that sit and stare at boot screens lol.Go get a bagel, take a piss do something crying over 10 seconds isn't exactly productive.
Rajinder Gill - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
This is called being enthusiastic about the wrong thing. If getting to the desktop matters that much to one's productivity, then using S3 resume would be the "logical" thing to do.Rajinder Gill - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Shame on me for making a rational argument to irrational minds... ;)SunnyNW - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
Actually shame on you for telling others what their priorities should be. Boot times are Very important to me and was one of the main reasons I upgraded from a hdd to a ssd in the first place. I dont want to have to wait more than the 15 seconds it takes my system to boot right now. People have to boot/restart their machine for various reasons and variable amounts of times, I dont want to have to wait more than 20 sec or so Every time I update software/drivers that require a reboot (windows update, gpu driver update, etc.). Almost every time I leave my house for more than 8 hrs or so I shut down my machine, I just dont have good luck with sleep on it, not sure if it's because of the radeon or what but ehh.Rajinder Gill - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
If you leave the house for 8 hours, your time cannot be worth enough money to be worried about 20 seconds of BOOT time :)SunnyNW - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
LOL!!! You are one Hilarious (my most polite way of saying pathetic) character. If you had any clue as to how much I Actually earn for my time, from all my various ventures especially my business, your ugly little smiles at the end of all your comments would more accurately be portrayed with a symbol that expressed your jaw wide open and hitting the floor. : 0 And how many times are you going to mention S3, lol, let me guess it's something you just recently learned about so you spout off about it Every single chance you get. Please don't reply to my comments in the future. I come here for intelligent interactions, not some nonsense from someone that has No Clue. Thank You in advance, Oh and just for you ;)Rajinder Gill - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
S3 resume, USE IT! One more time just for you :)xype - Monday, October 26, 2015 - link
SunnyNW, I never met one single person who made a shitload of money "with their time" who spent that time arguing online on tech sites, and arguing trivialities like SSD boot times—congrats, you’re the first!No person I know that makes $150+/hour gives a shit about boot times, and the people who do (working in IT, specifically high availability infrastructure ops) are in a whole different market from the one that AnandTech usually covers.
SunnyNW - Monday, October 26, 2015 - link
You are entitled to your opinion. But I agree, this was the first time I made a reference to my personal life finances thru comments and there is no need for that here. I just become Very annoyed when one judges others' priorities and I was already upset from other bs. Anyway not one of my finer moments.SunnyNW - Monday, October 26, 2015 - link
Lastly Ill add that 'making wrong assumptions' (especially when insulting) and 'questioning others priorities' are my pet peeves. On any other site I would not have replied in the first place. I dont know why but I feel differently when it comes to anandtechs community, I feel there is a higher standard here and many of the comments are usually very informative and worthwhile discussions. I work extremely hard and do not need someone telling me how much my time is worth. I hate when people sit behind their computer making assumptions about someone that they know absolutely nothing of, I do not expect that from the community here. I highly respect most of the commenters on anandtech and would like that in return. I feel anandtech is full of mostly intellectual persons. There are not many commenters on anandtech like mr. gill and I just let him get to me way more than I should have. Again I shouldnt have to explain myself to you but iunno here I am doing just that...I just turned 22 recently so gimme a beak, I'm learning.Rajinder Gill - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
If the sleep issues are due to the Radeon and BOOT time is that important, then perhaps a S3 resume complaint VGA would get you back to the desktop quicker. ;)SunnyNW - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
What is a "S3 resume complaint?" I have no complaints with my GPU and am very content with the 15 seconds it takes my machines to reach the desktop.ewitte - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
Working in IT the most annoying thing is boot times on OTHERS machines. I still run into spinning drives and insufficient memory which could be upwards of 10 minutes before performance stabilizes after a reboot.MHz Tweaker - Monday, November 16, 2015 - link
I have an IT service company and have been doing IT for a few decades. I am with you on how incredibly annoying it is to work on some of the hodge podge of hardware that comes in for service. Specifically there are those that refuse to upgrade early P4's or Sempron single core systems with 512 or 256 megs of RAM. Certainly these should have failed by now. They barely run XP let alone modern security needed to protect them. Internally all our workstations are Z97, X99, x79, Z170's with 4690K's, 4790K's, 5930K, 3930K and 6700K CPUs. Every machine has a Samsung or Intel SSD for a boot drive and a Hitachi 4, 5 or 6TB drive for work and storage. All systems also have 16 or 32GB RAM. I am just amazed at how much time the average person wastes waiting on an entry level PC to do things. I mean many of us spend in excess of 40 hours a week at a keyboard. I get much more done when I keep my equipment in tip top shape and fresh. Nothing has a chance to break down. Many companies throw tons of money at "image" but internally the infrastructure is held together with bubble gum and band aids.Oh BTW, I got our first 950 Pro 512MB Yesterday :-)
Deders - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Until Samsung announce again that SSD's are not meant to use sleep, their excuse for computers with 830/840's freezing for 30 seconds after waking up.BurntMyBacon - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
@Deders: "Until Samsung announce again that SSD's are not meant to use sleep, their excuse for computers with 830/840's freezing for 30 seconds after waking up."Is this a known issue or are you just speculating about what might (probably?) occur in the future?
I am using quite a few 830s and have deployed quite a few more all (up to this point) without this issue. In my experience, they've been some of the most reliable drives I've used. I know of a few 840s without issues as well, but I've tried to avoid them as much as practical as I'm still not convinced the industry fully understands the long term consequences of simultaneously increasing leakage and cutting down the margin of error to get that third (fourth, fifth, etc.) bit in. I suspect it'll be fine on some (larger) process nodes, but the 840EVO issues suggests that there is a lower limit to how small you can get while trying to get that extra bit (and storing long term). In any case, it would be nice to know if there is something I should be looking out for here and whether practical mitigations exist.
bill.rookard - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
Agreed. I have several systems with the 830s in them and have zero problems with them. I avoided the 840s because those went with the TLC and I was iffy about them, and the 830s are rock solid and very fast.Chaser - Tuesday, October 27, 2015 - link
Boot times matter to me too. Makaveli must have a remote control while he's making his bagels.carl0ski - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link
I'd say the most annoying part is the Windows boot logo is a fixed time to complete.So even if Windows 7 8 10 boot up faster it still waits for the pretty video.
Turn it off from msconfig and windows 7 on 850 will boot in 3 seconds instead of 10 seconds
beginner99 - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Most people that buy such a product usually are enthusiast and play around like over clocking. 10 sec more per boot is then pretty annoying.Makaveli - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I'm from the era of overclocking with jumpers on a motherboard and far longer post times. If waiting 10 seconds for a machine to boot is too long while trying to get a stable overclock then do it in windows. Or does everyone in this generation have ADD?AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Oh, so time is only valuable to those with ADD? You're a fool.Makaveli - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Go troll else where tool!sorten - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
'elsewhere' is one wordFrozenGiraffe - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
And why would these people boot it every day?Rajinder Gill - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
If speed matters that much, use S3 resume, it is the fastest way back to the desktop. :)Samus - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
I reboot my PC 3 times a year. I could give two shits in a cup about boot times.5th element - Monday, October 26, 2015 - link
Couldn't. It's couldn't give two shits not could.Beaver M. - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
With the beta NVMe driver it takes about 300 ms longer.geniekid - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro...Based on that link I would say issues with NVMe boot times are largely firmware issues that are being rectified.
Refuge - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
If they updated their baseline every time new tech came out then they would be so busy retesting to have comparable results, that we would never see a new review ever again.AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Thanks geniekid! That review is far more valuable than what we have here on AT. AT said "loading a new level in a video game would be more likely to show noticeable difference from better performance here". More likely, huh. Then you go look at the actual data at techreport and find there's nearly zero difference. When will AT learn to measure an SSD in an actually useful way?StrangerGuy - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Game load times are actually the least sensitive to SSD speeds. Even a 15 year old game like Red Alert 2 with a next to zero RAM footprint certainly doesn't load instantly on a Crucial M550, much less current titles.bill.rookard - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
VERY interesting. Of particular note is the Crucial MX200 - an older drive, and connected via SATA which trades blows back and forth with the newer PCIe - nvme based drives. Wow, good stuff.Deders - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I think it was only PCIe drives that had long booting times like the Intel 750.Gigaplex - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
These are PCIe drives.Deders - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
I mean slotted drives as the drive controller has to load from the deviceKristian Vättö - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I have a 256GB 950 PRO in my system (AsRock Z170 Extreme 7) and boot time is about 8 seconds with ultra fast boot enabled in BIOS/UEFI.Jacerie - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Why would you go on about how awesome Skylake and the 100 series chipset are for PCIe connected drives and then use a Haswell chip and a Z97 board for the test rig? Time to go back to the bench.Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
The Haswell system is what I've got on hand to test with, and it's what allows my results to be directly comparable with the reviews from earlier this year.Skylake gives you PCIe 3 from the PCH, but on the testbed we always use an x16 slot directly off the CPU for PCIe SSDs, so we don't need Skylake to run the drive at PCIe 3 speeds.
Jacerie - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Will you be posting a follow-up to highlight any controller differences with the newer hardware?MrSpadge - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
This is not a SATA controller we're talking about, it's PCIe. And there we have hardly seen any differences between different implementations over the years.hansmuff - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
May I humbly request an addition to the review to show performance AND issues when using a PCI Express 2.0 to M.2 adapter on an older platform like the P67A?Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
If I'd had more time, I probably would have done more informal testing on some older machines. I can at least assure you that the drive doesn't seem to have any trouble in a PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 slot on my personal Haswell machine. Next time I'm poking around in my Lynnfield server I'll be checking how the pcie drives work, especially power management. But I probably won't do a full suite of performance tests, just enough to get a rough idea for how fast drives perform on a slower link. And I really don't have a clue when I'll get around to this, because I've still got quite the backlog of drives to review.hansmuff - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Understandable, thanks for the PCIe 2.0 update.The_Assimilator - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Thermal throttling is disappointing but shows that M.2, like SATA Express, is DOA. PCIe drives with heatsinks, or preferably U.2, is the future - hopefully with the Z200 series chipsets, manufacturers will ditch SATAe in favour of U.2 and we can finally get a worthy successor to SATA3.MrSpadge - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
DOA it certainly is not. You're free to attach a tiny RAM heatsink on the drive and be fine. Or simply forget about throtteling in real world usage (unless you use it in a server).Redstorm - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Under a normal client workload you don't get anywhere near triggering the thermal protection so adding heat sinks is not required. Agree SATA Express was still born. M.2 is far from it, if you look at any new release ultrabook you will find a M.2 SSD under the lid.The_Assimilator - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
M.2 is a great solution for replacing 2.5" SSDs in space-limited applications like ultrabooks, but for *absolute maximum performance without thermal throttling*, 2.5" U.2 drives a la Intel's 750 are still the way to go.zodiacfml - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
It depends on the designer on how much throttling they would allow or not. U.2 allows more freedom though but I reckon would be much more expensive and less dense in the future.user_5447 - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Why everyone keep saying that BIOS/UEFI must support NVMe to boot into OS?You can install GRUB bootloader on cheap small USB flash drive and use it to boot from NVMe drives on any system, since GRUB itself supports NVMe for few years now.
And yes, GRUB supports booting into Windows 8.1 / 10.
bji - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
They say it because it's true. Nobody wants to have to manage a USB drive just for booting their system. You can also install a floppy drive and boot from that, would you recommend that also? How about keeping a separate computer up constantly to support PXE booting from the network? Would you recommend that level of headache to someone who just wants to boot their frickin computer?bji - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
By the way, of all of the things I have to deal with when installing/upgrading Linux systems, grub is the most painful and problematic, by MANY orders of magnitude. I would *NEVER* recommend that a non-technical user have anything to do with grub, especially not for something as silly as booting a PC into Windows off of an NVMe drive.user_5447 - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Yeah, just buy Skylake motherboard, CPU and DDR4 RAM.And I'm not saying that it's simple, I'm saying that it's possible. You don't have to do anything special after setting it up, just keep small USB drive plugged in at the back of your PC.
user_5447 - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Also, you can do it without additional USB drive, if you have at least one installed SATA device.Redstorm - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Still a crap solutionEssence_of_War - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I have had exactly two problems with GRUB.1) When windows destroys it because lolz.
2) When I was trying to install gentoo into a zfs root with on a luks encrypted disk.
Grub is fine and has been for a while.
SyukriLajin - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
windows shouldn't be able to mess with it if grub is installed on an external usb drive, and then setting the usb drive as the main boot device(all bios i've seen supports this). it's called chainloading, and it's not a bad hack if you don't have all the proper hardware but still want to try it. of course, it will require some technical knowledge. and because i'm poor, and can't afford a new system, if it works, it's good enough.hero4hire - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
If you're poor you wouldn't buy a nvme ssd. It is interesting to talk possibilities thoughEwitte12 - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
It didn't take much to figure out how to insert the nvme modules into a z87 motherboard. However I was prepared to replace it with a z97 if it messed up. I was NOT even considering the 600+ to go to skylake.Redstorm - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Because what you propose is not a very good solution at all.eddieobscurant - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
The problem with that theoretical solution (which i've tried) is that windows won't let you install on it when it lists the disk drives.If you migrate an installation from a sata drive, you get a bsod upon restart due to the different ahci/nvme drive required similar to the ahci/ide for sata drives.
So there isn't a solution
Gigaplex - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
You'd need to use the Windows deployment tools such as DISM to apply the WIM file, rather than run the regular install wizard.Gigaplex - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
What you're proposing isn't actually booting the drive. It's chainloading. The assessment is accurate, and chainloading is a long standing practice for this type of problem. It's also a hack that has no business being used for general consumer usage.R3MF - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
does the supplied samsung driver work with Win7, and is its use as simple as pointing the windows installer to a USB thumbdrive at the appropriate point?Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
The Samsung NVMe driver was provided as an installer program. After running the installer, there was no need to explicitly change which NVMe driver was used for the 950 Pro. I tested it on Windows 7, 8.1, and 10.Badelhas - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I have a Vertex 3 128GB SSD. Do you guys believe I will see real world gains if I upgrade to the Samsung 950 Pro 256GB?MrSpadge - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
If your usage is "normal" for a desktop, I suspect "no" is the answer. Unless you're doing a side-by-side comparison. Watch the disk drive LED on your machine. If it's glowing constantly you're being limited by the storage, otherwise not. Or look at the drive load in task manager (shown since Win 8).III-V - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
>For starters, the 950 Pro's power consumption increases as it heats up, and I've seen its idle power climb by as much as 4.5% from power on to equilibrium.Er, yeah, that's how typical transistors work... they get leakier as they heat up :\
boogerlad - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
What is the latency difference between having this ssd connected directly to the cpu, and through the pch? I'm very curious but no one has tested this.TelstarTOS - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Performance is a bit of a mixed bag, but price/perf ratio is great.Waiting for intel countermove now :)
DIYEyal - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Does it suffer from similar thermal throttling issues as it's predecessors (SM951 and XP941)? I have seen people putting a heat sink on these and they report improvement in sustained performance.theMillen - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-ssd-950-pro-51... will answer any heat throttling questions you have, ie yes! but a simple fan solves them :-pAnnonymousCoward - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
This 5,600-word review utterly fails to penetrate to the bottom-line answer: the 950 Pro gives virtually zero desktop-usage performance advantage, while costing more than double of SATAIII drives. That only took 17 words.http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro...
Redstorm - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Quote: "Lucky for that Samsung 950 Pro SSD or i would never have made that head shot" - said no one ever.PVG - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I don't want to believe you tested a PCIe 3.0 4x drive on a board with a PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 socket, so I'm guessing you used some kind of PCIe card adapter hooked up to the 3.0 lanes from de CPU, right?Billy Tallis - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
Yep. We're always using the PCIe lanes off the CPU, and with a riser card and adapter that allows for the power measurement.PVG - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
That sounds like a cool setup. You should show it, sometime. ;)zodiacfml - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
I'm just impressed with the SM951. All these PCIe drives are not terrible and gives excellent performance over SATA anyway. Their differences are pretty negligible in real world use. The challenge now (esp. for Samsung) is more capacity and lower prices.I can't shake the idea of NAS devices with M.2 drives.
zodiacfml - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
Additionally, NVMe doesn't improve much for the clients. It seems like a specification they added on consumer drives to increase its adoption to benefit their server/enterprise storage products.wyewye - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
Billy, you shit the bed: half of graphs are randomly missing Intel 750, the only competing consumer drive.However, good job on highlighting the termal issues of 950 Pro.
lilmoe - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
Welcome to the world of amazingly consistent charts, brought to you by Anandtech.SyukriLajin - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
who knew that storage would require bandwidth as high as a graphic card. just a few years ago, it's the slowest component of your computer.herbc - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
How fast do you really need to be happy with using a computer is my question , my computer is faster now than i actually need it to be and all it has is a current SSD .Woff - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
I have a system with Asus X99 DeLuxe motherboard and a I7-5960X cpu. I use a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD connected to one of the SATA ports, but I want to upgrade this device to a M.2 Samsung 950 Pro. The motherboard offers two ways to connect a M.2 but I don't know witch is the best alternative. The X99 has a on-board M.2 (socket3) but is also delivered with a expansion card, a 'HYPER M.2 x4' card. Anyone who can help me with the best (fastest) solution to my problem?Redstorm - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
You should be OK to use the Onboard M.2 slot as the manual says "32Gb transfer for the onboard M.2" page 'x' so 4 x PCIe 3.0cjelliott - Tuesday, November 17, 2015 - link
How did you get on with this 950 Pro SSD on the X99 Deluxe? Can you boot from it? I am tempted to buy this SSD but have seen a lot of forums where people are having trouble. I want to install and boot Win 10 Pro from it.l_d_allan - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
Hmmmm ... the Samsung Galaxy review was at the top for 5 days, then one day for an ASUS mother board, and only one day for the Surface 4, and now several days for the Samsung PCie SSD.Seems unbalanced. Or just "the luck of the draw"?
Kristian Vättö - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
Usually content is only released on weekdays, so reviews that go up later in the week (e.g. on Thursday) may get several days of page time. Oftentimes the content release is dictated by an embargo lift, so the time of publishing isn't on AnandTech's hands.I can assure you that this is just a coincidence - there's no rule or contract that a certain company must get X number of days at the top. Frankly, it wasn't even something we thought about during my time at AnandTech as content always went up when it was ready and free for publishing.
Craig234 - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
"The Intel SSD 750 clearly needs to come down in price to be completely sidelined by the 950 Pro. "I think you mean to AVOID being completely...
TheBeagle - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
I case anybody is interested, Amazon.com has this lovely items for sale (pre-order) right now. The Amazon web site says the product will be released for sale on Thursday, October 29th. Hurry up before they're all gone - LOL! BeagleFXi - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
I know it's not a lot of space but some degree of power loss protection would have been proper for a "pro" device in this price category.Kristian Vättö - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
The 950 PRO, just like all Samsung client SSDs, do journaling to protect the FTL against sudden power losses. Protection for cached user data is not really needed since modern file systems have been designed to withstand minor data losses (HDDs also use DRAM to cache writes, so SSDs are no different in that sense).Per Hansson - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
If you really need it FXi there is always the announced Samsung SM953 drive.It's 110mm long due to the inclusion of the tantalum capacitors, otherwise it's very similar to the SM951...
http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global/file/i...
R3MF - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
i was under the impression that win7 (install disk) does not support nvme, so i'm curious as to how you went about getting Win7 on a 950?Kristian Vättö - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
There is a hotfix NVMe driver available for Windows 7: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2990941blos - Monday, October 26, 2015 - link
I slipstreamed that hotfix (and almost 200 other fixes) using NTLite to a Win7SP1 image, wrote it back to usb, booted and it would still not allow me to install to a 951 NVMe drive... no drives found.Has anybody got this to work?
Windows 10 installs just fine but I have an unused W7 Pro license and I would really like to use it to active a W10 install.
I hear the next version of W10 will activate directly from W7 licenses... but hopefully that'll arrive in time before the W10 will really want the activation. Or perhaps re-arming to extend a bit?
Per Hansson - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
Yes it works but you need to integrate it in boot.wim as well.I made some details here about it, also nothing an errors that MS is still to fix in that KB article.
Even though I reported it a long time ago:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1543242/found-samsung-s...
blos - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
Ah that explains a lot, didn't know that the boot.wim was a different environment :)Quick search indicates that boot.wim integration is already available on the NTLite, so I guess it's playtime for this weekend :)
catavalon21 - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
The test system doesn't have a discrete video card. Would a high-powered video card impact the performance of the M.2 PCIe setup?AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
No.Caramonn - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
I've read the review and others and I guess I don't see a reason to get one of these drives yet. Am I missing something? It seems that the real world performance doesn't justify the nearly twice the cost as other Samsung SATA drives. I was really hoping that the rated speeds would translate into actual real world performance, but that doesn't appear to be the case.Tuishimi - Thursday, November 5, 2015 - link
$350... I could live with that. Sounds like a decent piece of hardware.ElBerryKM13 - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link
If you had $1000 to spend which one would you get? this 950 pro m.2 or intel 1.2TB m.2?srieppo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Get two 950 in RAID 0. I'm currently running that and it's amazing. What you should put money on depends on your needs though. For gaming SSD is not very important. But I already run 6700k with fast memory and 980TI SLI so was a logical next step.1TB of superfast SSD is the last bit. HDD for storage, power options to shut the HDD down when idle (silent) and online backup for important data is the way I like...
mapesdhs - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Typo on pp. 9, the word "duplicating" is shown twice, or was that a really late April Fool? :Dmapesdhs - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
Pondering whether to get a 950 Pro 256GB for a SkyLake laptop (MSI GE72 6QF). Despite the glowing benchmark results, it looks as if there would be little gain for real world usage compared to, say, an 850 EVO M.2 which is way cheaper (132 UKP for 500GB, vs. 147 UKP for 950 Pro 256GB), uses less power and thus would afford longer battery life. Edging towards the 850 EVO despite my nerdy addiction to speed...Killerkicker2011 - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link
Would the 950 pro work with my Macbook Pro Late 2013?Quarysma - Saturday, January 16, 2016 - link
I bought 950 pro but i having trouble rate. My system test results as follows:836 / 806 MB/s read/write.My system: Asus Z97m plus, 2*8 Corsair 2400 Mhz. i5-4690K, Corsair h110i, 1000W PSU.
I wonder why I'm having problems ?
Thanks for all...
robitlgnaz - Tuesday, February 2, 2016 - link
I have Asus Z97 deluxe with m.2 slot, but supporting only x4 PCI 2.0 (instead of x4 PCi 3.0).So on my mobo and yours too this m.2 support only 1.0Gbit or 1.000MB.;(
I think (and asking) that with PCIe adapter i and you can put that in x8 lanes of PCI 2.0 and get full spedd with that? I have only one graphics card so this is the only way, or?
Quarysma - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
Either we get PCI-e card or will switch to the DDR4 system. I moved to a DDR4 system.I'm ordered DDR4 system and waiting for the parts.
yury2808 - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Beware! This drive (950 Pro / 512 GB) is terribly slow, if you set your disk to be "compressed" in Win7/10. I used it save my vmware space for years with other SSD drives (intel/samsung/ocz) and never had an issue.But yesterday, we got 2x nvme 950 pro and found, that speed is dropping almost immediately to ... 3 MB/s with huge latency.
I don't know, how their firmware goes around benchmarks (which are all cool for 'incompressible' data) but for real life - this drive get a HUGE hit when OS compress data.
ps. sure, I have plenty CPU for it, so it's not the case.
Redstorm - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link
Be aware the new Samsung NVMe driver 1.1 drops performance by about 10% across the board. They should update the article with new perf numbers as its giving a false impression ATM.Chris023 - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
Just a little FYI for anyone that runs across this article. I'm planning a new build later this year so buy components I can use now toward that end. 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. This doesn't represent everyday usage but it does say what the potential is. Average will shoot up much higher once I get a true PCIe MB with native NVMe drive support. Should work nicely with a Z170 based MB. One more note is I'm using the Samsung NVMe driver and not the native Windows 10 driver.IAEInferno - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Longevity of the Samsung 950 pro?