The Samsung 960 Pro (2TB) SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on October 18, 2016 10:00 AM ESTSequential Read Performance
The sequential read test requests 128kB blocks and tests queue depths ranging from 1 to 32. The queue depth is doubled every three minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The test spans the entire drive, and the drive is filled before the test begins. The primary score we report is an average of performances at queue depths 1, 2 and 4, as client usage typically consists mostly of low queue depth operations.
The 2TB 960 Pro's low queue depth sequential read speed is about 300MB/s faster than the 950 Pro, once again giving Samsung the clear lead in performance and showing that the 960 Pro is significantly better than the 950 Pro where thermal limits are a factor.
The 960 Pro consumes more power than its predecessors, but given the high performance it is the most efficient drive for this workload.
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The slight drop in performance beyond QD1 indicates that the 960 Pro is still thermally limited for most of this test, and that like the 950 Pro it may perform much better with a heatsink.
Sequential Write Performance
The sequential write test writes 128kB blocks and tests queue depths ranging from 1 to 32. The queue depth is doubled every three minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The test spans the entire drive, and the drive is filled before the test begins. The primary score we report is an average of performances at queue depths 1, 2 and 4, as client usage typically consists mostly of low queue depth operations.
Thermals are an even bigger factor for the sequential write test than for sequential reads. The 960 Pro is 60% faster than the next fastest M.2 SSD and almost catches up to the RD400A with its thermal pad behind the controller allowing it to use its adapter card as a heatsink.
The 960 Pro's power consumption is only slightly higher than its M.2 competitors and far less than the RD400A. Given the performance, this makes the 960 Pro by far the most efficient SSD on this test, with about 30% higher performance per watt than the next most efficient drive.
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The QD1 performance of the 960 Pro is substantially higher than during the rest of the test where the drive is continuously thermally limited. The power consumption is only slightly higher at QD1 as the drive is able to spend a bit more power before its temperature gets up to the limit, then the drive reaches equilibrium at around 4.4W.
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DanNeely - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Does your mobo power the m.2 slot, or just the LEDs? Baring evidence to the contrary I'd assume it's only the latter that are getting power, and enough residual power to run a few LEDs for a minute would only give a few seconds for the 960 in its deepest power saving modes, or far less while doing writes.bji - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
How does your computer know to shut down in that event? Is there a signal to the operating system from the power supply to notify it that power has been lost and that it should shut down? Because if not, all that will happen is that 1 minute more of data will be written to the drive, only to be lost when the power abruptly cuts out when the capacitors lose their charge.ddriver - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Obviously it doesn't matter if the PSU doesn't send a signal to the system, which it doesn't. It wouldn't matter even if you have an UPS that could last an hour if it can't signal the system to shut down or at least flush caches before power runs out completely.noeldillabough - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
I was thinking the exact same thing ACK no battery/capacitors? I'd never turn off buffer flushing.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
I agree that what you've described is what those options *seem* to mean. But the semantics behind those checkboxes are clearly very different for NVMe drives and SATA drives, and it is an outright bug for Microsoft to apply the same description to both cases. The Samsung 960 Pro is also not the only drive to severely underperform without disabling write cache buffer flushing; the 950 Pro without Samsung's driver seems to be similar and I've seen this behavior on at least other vendor's NVMe controller. This is a serious concern that requires further investigation, but I'm not ready to lay the blame on the Samsung 960 Pro. If Microsoft's defaults for NVMe drives is the most reasonable behavior for consumer workloads (including the risk of power loss), then that would imply that most or all of the vendor-specific NVMe drivers are playing fast and loose with data safety, and possibly so are Microsoft's SATA/AHCI drivers.shodanshok - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
"that would imply that most or all of the vendor-specific NVMe drivers are playing fast and loose with data safety, and possibly so are Microsoft's SATA/AHCI drivers"This can be quite true, especially considering as some vendors publish "turbo-cached mode" that supposedly enhance disk write speed. By the way the storage controller drives is such a critical kernel component that I will try hard to stay with Microsoft own driver, unless extensive testing on vendor-specific drivers confirms their stability.
HollyDOL - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Wouldn't INT 0 (power loss) fire fast enough to execute flush command in time for decent PSU to handle that before running out of power? Most of "decent+" PSUs seem to have quite a power buffer in capacitors to survive that long... with 300k IOPS it should manage to save with a decent margin.Even my old Corsair TX manages to survive micro-outages without computer shutting down or crashing. Afaic ATX2.01 PSU is required to endure at least 17ms power outage without losing output power. With 330k IOPS at hand it should be enough to quick save.
Not that I'd be all out to go and try :-)
beginner99 - Wednesday, October 19, 2016 - link
This would be something guys at anandtech could test. It would also probably help to build back the sites reputation and output of interesting articles.Create a script that does some file system operations, then pull the plug. Repeat 10 times for each drive, driver and settings and see what happens. Yeah a lot of work.
leexgx - Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - link
only intel SSDs that have super caps never lose data ,, Intel 320 and S3500 (some site tested it and only intel SSDs never corrupted some SSDs flat out failed the Crucial M4)http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st...
normal SSDs that have small caps (not super caps) that say they have power loss protection that is only there to protect the page table from bee trashed not the data it self that is currently been written that still be loss
Gigaplex - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
"then that would imply that most or all of the vendor-specific NVMe drivers are playing fast and loose with data safety"I would not be surprised if that's exactly what they're doing.