Samsung SM951-NVMe (256GB) PCIe SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on June 25, 2015 9:40 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
While The Destroyer focuses on sustained and worst-case performance by hammering the drive with nearly 1TB worth of writes, the Heavy trace provides a more typical enthusiast and power user workload. By writing less to the drive, the Heavy trace doesn't drive the SSD into steady-state and thus the trace gives us a good idea of peak performance combined with some basic garbage collection routines. For full details of the test, please refer to the this article.
As the SM951 has been better optimized for typical client workloads than the SSD 750, it outperforms the Intel drive by a healthy margin. We don't really see much difference between the NVMe and AHCI versions, though, as the NVMe version has only marginally lower latency than it's AHCI sibling.
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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.