Samsung SM951-NVMe (256GB) PCIe SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on June 25, 2015 9:40 AM ESTATTO - Transfer Size vs Performance
I'm keeping our ATTO test around because it's a tool that can easily be run by anyone and it provides a quick look into performance scaling across multiple transfer sizes. I'm providing the results in a slightly different format because the line graphs didn't work well with multiple drives and creating the graphs was rather painful since the results had to be manually inserted cell be cell as ATTO doesn't provide a 'save as CSV' functionality.
AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance
I'm also keeping AS-SSD around as it's freeware like ATTO and can be used by our readers to confirm that their drives operate properly. AS-SSD uses incompressible data for all of its transfers, so it's also a valuable tool when testing SandForce based drives that perform worse with incompressible data.
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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.