The Samsung 960 EVO (1TB) Review
by Billy Tallis on November 15, 2016 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here.
As with the previous ATSB tests, the 960 EVO can't quite keep pace with Samsung's MLC-based 950 Pro and 960 Pro SSDs, but it is slightly faster than the OCZ RD400. On this test the 960 EVO suffers relatively more from a full drive, where it falls behind the RD400.
Average service times are slightly slower for the 960 EVO than Samsung's other PCIe SSDs, and the competing PCIe SSDs are a step further behind.
The 960 EVO is tied for first place with minimal high-latency outliers, but all of the PCIe SSDs are much better than the SATA drives.
Once again the 960 EVO's power efficiency is about the same as Samsung's other drives, showing that its higher instantaneous power draw than SATA drives is compensated by it completing the test quicker.
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Foralin - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I'd like to see this kind of analisys for the new Macbook Pro's SSDphilehidiot - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I think that often Apple use a couple of different suppliers for their SSDs (certainly was the case when I bought my Air ages ago) and they're unlikely to hand out samples for testing as if there's one thing Apple seems to hate, it's scrutiny. This means that you might have to buy quite a few Macbooks, ID the SSD and then you'd still never know if they were using one, two, three or even four different suppliers unless you got loads of people to run the appropriate software and then went on a shopping spree. Hoping of course that you could return those you've unpacked, set up, tested and carefully repackaged.... Whilst it'd be nice, Apple don't make it easy and unless you're loaded it's not going to be practical.repoman27 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Apple sourced SSDs from Samsung, SanDisk and Toshiba back when they used SATA SSDs, but went 100% Samsung when they switched to PCIe. The 2015 MBPs were all SM951, for instance. From what I've seen thus far, the 2016 MBPs use a new, in-house designed PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe controller paired with SanDisk NAND.repoman27 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
And I take that back that last bit because I just saw a post with a photo of the internals of the MBP w/ TouchBar and it looked to have a Samsung SSD on board.Threska - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
One disadvantage I see of the M.2 form-factor is inadequate cooling on some motherboards, compared to their more traditional SSD brethren.willis936 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
There's a quick fix for that: an ugly PCIe adapter with a heatsink. Or actually slapping some RAM heatsinks on the drive itself. I've been looking for a 2x M.2 to PCIe x8 adapter. The only ones I've found are expensive server adapters. Considering one of these drives nearly saturates 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes it seems that a regular consumer who wants to do RAID 0 should run their GPU in x8 (or go all out on HEDT) and get two PCIe adapters with heatsinks.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
The issue is that is only possible on desktops. Laptops are more SOL in this regard.willis936 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
More performance = more power. It would be neat if they made different power profiles that could be set by the user through the OS. I don't want 5W pulled from my laptop just for my SSD to read 2 GB/s but I also don't need it to run that quickly.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
That's a nifty idea! I would like that too :)Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
NVMe already has that feature. Drives can define multiple power states, both operational and non-operational idle. The definition of those power states can include information about the relative performance impact on read and write throughput and latency, and how long it takes to enter and leave the different idle power states. For example, the 960 Pro declares a full-power operational power state with maximum power draw of up to 6.9W, and restricted operational power states with limits of 5.5W and 5.1W. It also declares two non-operational idle power states with limits of 0.05W and 0.008W, which my measurements have haven't accurately captured.Making full use of this capability requires better support on the software side.