Samsung SM951 (512GB) PCIe SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on February 24, 2015 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
The Light trace is designed to be an accurate illustration of basic usage. It's basically a subset of the Heavy trace, but we've left out some workloads to reduce the writes and make it more read intensive in general.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Light - Specs | ||||||||||||
| Reads | 372,630 | |||||||||||
| Writes | 459,709 | |||||||||||
| Total IO Operations | 832,339 | |||||||||||
| Total GB Read | 17.97 GB | |||||||||||
| Total GB Written | 23.25 GB | |||||||||||
| Average Queue Depth | ~4.6 | |||||||||||
| Focus | Basic, light IO usage | |||||||||||
The Light trace still has more writes than reads, but a very light workload would be even more read-centric (think web browsing, document editing, etc). It has about 23GB of writes, which would account for roughly two or three days of average usage (i.e. 7-11GB per day).
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Light - IO Breakdown | |||||||||||
| IO Size | <4KB | 4KB | 8KB | 16KB | 32KB | 64KB | 128KB | ||||
| % of Total | 6.2% | 27.6% | 2.4% | 8.0% | 6.5% | 4.8% | 26.4% | ||||
The IO distribution of the Light trace is very similar to the Heavy trace with slightly more IOs being 128KB. About 70% of the IOs are sequential, though, so that is a major difference compared to the Heavy trace.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Light - QD Breakdown | ||||||||||||
| Queue Depth | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4-5 | 6-10 | 11-20 | 21-32 | >32 | ||||
| % of Total | 73.4% | 16.8% | 2.6% | 2.3% | 3.1% | 1.5% | 0.2% | 0.2% | ||||
Over 90% of the IOs have a queue depth of one or two, which further proves the importance of low queue depth performance.
The SM951 yet again provides roughly twice the data rate compared to the XP941 and with a full drive the difference is even more significant.
The same goes for average latency where the SM951's score is about one third of the XP941's. The SM951 can without a doubt boost performance with lighter IO loads as well, although in very light workloads the bottleneck tends to be the speed of user input (think about document creation for instance).
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blanarahul - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
Can't wait to see what Intel brings to the table considering the amount of focus they put on consistency.extide - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
I'm not sure that we will see anything too interesting client side from them. They seemed to have moved all their focus to the enterprise side, which is of course where the bulk of the money is.FWIW, Intel already has a PCIe SSD that is arguably faster -- the Intel SSD DC P3700
dylan522p - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
Is, not arguablyStuka87 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
It is faster, and certainly more reliable. Intel has the best enterprise SSDs on the market.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
-- Intel has the best enterprise SSDs on the market.Among consumer facing companies, perhaps. The real enterprise SSD/flash players are largely unknown to AnandTech and its readers.
monsted - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
I'd love to see the results of a HDS FMD compared to the usual suspects.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
We've had this conversation before and I'll tell you this again: the majority of flash array vendors are using SSDs from Intel, SanDisk, Samsung and others. There are some that design and build their own drives/blades (e.g. Violin and Skyera), but the vast majority is using third party drives as the heart of their flash arrays.GTVic - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
All drives now should support eDrive.Railgun - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
At the rate I'm going, I'll end up with one of these before my XP941 ever gets powered up once, retail or otherwise.Laststop311 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
Disappointed in lack of 1TB size/ no 3d vnand/ no nvme. I planned on using 1 of these in 1TB size for a boot drive for a skylake-e build. The good news is I have a couple years for samsung to fix those issues.