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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
110 Comments
View All Comments
Ninhalem - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
I'm going to ask a slightly noob question: would it be possible to use these drives with the Z77 series if there was an update to the UEFI bios to recognize these drives in addition to Samsung providing the right drivers?wownotown - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
I have used a OCZ Revodrive for the last 2 years and love the performance over PCI-Express. Now that this is native with no bridge, it should be nice. Hopefully boot times improve with this tech. One the OCZ, you have a BIOS which adds 8 or more seconds to the boot time, which is nothing to complain about too much, but it would be nice to just boot into the OS, without the additional delays. I little pricey for me, but once competition enters the market, they will have to drop prices.landerf - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Could you please alert Samsung to the fact consumers will want these in black PCB color. As soon as one starts doing it the others will follow.dstarr3 - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
I'll never understand why anyone gives a toss what the inside of their computer looks like.pipja - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
some people have naked setups...Jay77 - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Doesn't one of the new Asrock Z97 boards have an M.2 connector that runs at pcie 3.0 x4? Stick that thing in there and see if boots!RamCity - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
On page two of this review, Kristian confirmed that the XP941 is bootable in the ASRock X97 Extreme6. They'll have a separate review of that motherboard in a review soon.RamCity - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
I mean ASRock Z97 Extreme 6!BMNify - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
MR city, do you happen to have any of those Everspin ST-MRAM DDR3 DIMMs has to hit equal density with consumer DIMMs aka these or their updates http://www.extremetech.com/computing/140318-eversp...id like you or anand (not while he's dunking biscuits in his tea OC :) to test them two/four sticks etc today and confirm they are far faster than NAND etc.... please
RamCity - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Looks like interesting tech! Maybe there'll be a sneak preview at Computech in July.Rod