Samsung SM951 (512GB) PCIe SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on February 24, 2015 8:00 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.
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The SM951 does much better at all IO sizes than the XP941 and especially read performance scales much better.
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.
Our sequential Iometer tests already showed that the SM951 is fast and AS-SSD provides further proof that the drive can easily reach ~1500MB/s.
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Makaveli - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
I would love to see two Samsung 850Pro 256GB drives in Raid 0 vs this.BPB - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
I was really hoping to see this compared to a RAID 0 setup. I'm considering getting one of these or a competitor's version in 2 or 3 months, but I'm also considering just getting another Samsung SSD and creating a RAID 0 setup.Flash13 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
Why trust Samsung? I don't anymore.youtard - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
hurr!icrf - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
Suggestion for the graphs/charts picked from a drop down: make them all have the same scale, so when flipping between them, it's easier to compare from a visual shift. Ideally, it wouldn't be a drop down, but a set of checkboxes that would show/hide each line graph on the same chart to see more than one at once. If you're pre-rendering the charts, I understand how that would be a problem.Edgar_in_Indy - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
It would be a lot easier to get excited about this drive if there were real-world numbers to look at. I find it frustrating that most hard drive reviews don't show some basic load times. You know, how long to boot windows, to load a level in a game, copy a huge file, etc.It would make it much easier to judge the relative performance of drives, and decide whether the results justify the upgrade cost.
willis936 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
While it requires more technical knowledge from the reader it actually gives a lot more useful info. Time to load windows? Is that on first boot after install? After updates? After 100 programs are installed? After 10 r/w cycles? After the drive isfiles filled? With overprovisioning? I'd personally much rather synthetic tests that cover most cases so you can extrapolate subjective performance from it. You just have to know which workloads line up with which tests.DanNeely - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Page 2 of the article, section "A Word About Storage Benches and Real World Tests".TLDR version: "Too much background IO for consistent results to be possible."
Edgar_in_Indy - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
From that same section: "I know some of you have criticized our benchmarks due to the lack of real world application tests, but the unfortunate truth is that it's close to impossible to build a reliable test suite that can be executed in real time. Especially if you want to test something else than just boot and application launch times, there is simply too many tasks in the background that cannot be properly controlled to guarantee valid results. "Okay, then. So a complicated real-world test is difficult to duplicate. But why can't we at least have the simple "boot and application launch times" he referenced? And what about a large file copy, like I already mentioned? That's something most people could easily relate to. And time to compress a large group of files? Etc.
If the whole idea of an SSD is to do things faster, then it would be helpful to get a stopwatch involved in these types of review, at least a little bit!
Or if it really is "Mission Impossible" to document any real world speed improvements, then I can't help but wonder if this is kind of like people paying premiums for high-performance memory, with very little real-world return.
zodiacfml - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Why not do a benchmark of a Windows installation in a virtual machine from a RAM disk?