Samsung SSD XP941 Review: The PCIe Era Is Here
by Kristian Vättö on May 15, 2014 12:00 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based—we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we're testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||
Workload | Description | Applications Used |
Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox |
Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Starcraft 2, BioShock Infinite |
Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox |
General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware |
Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 |
Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 |
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we've been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
In our most demanding storage test, the XP941 is just amazing. It's about 40% faster than any SATA 6Gbps drive we have tested, which is huge. Obviously it's not the random performance that makes the XP941 shine but the large IO sequential performance where the PCIe interface can be used to its full extent. While most IOs in client workloads tend to be random, the sequential performance can certainly make a big difference and high queue depth random reads can also take advantage of the faster interface.
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jimjamjamie - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Looking forward to these hitting mainstream, though it will be quite strange plugging storage drives into PCIe slots..Impulses - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Can't wait for the "is it ok to sandwich this SSD between my two scorching hot R9 290?" posts!pipja - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
rofl can't wait for that day to come, but then it'd be some R1000 980750235 something :pLordOfTheBoired - Friday, May 16, 2014 - link
Isn't the R1000 980750235 just a rebadged 7770?Antronman - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Clearly you haven't tested any Fusion iO products.Kristian Vättö - Saturday, May 17, 2014 - link
Fusion IO doesn't make any drives that are aimed for the client market.snark9a - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Can I install one in my 2013 rMBP?SirKnobsworth - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
No. Apple uses a proprietary connector so an M.2 SSD won't fit. I believe aftermarket solutions are becoming available though - maybe from OWC?darwinosx - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Aftermarket solutions for Apple devices have been available for a long time.Penti - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
They still does not have one for PCIe-based Macs.