The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTIdle Power Consumption
The idle power consumption I'm reporting here and in the Bench database is what's achievable on our 2015 testbed with PCIe ASPM disabled for the sake of system stability. Samsung's initial announcement of the 950 Pro specified an idle power consumption of 1.7W, which these drives manage to stay under. Samsung's later specs mention 70mW idle and 2.5mW DevSlp power draw. The former figure is something we hope to be able to verify in the future, but our power meter isn't sensitive enough for measuring DevSlp power.
As stated earlier, the power numbers for the PCIe drives are more of a worst-case scenario, due to our testbed being unable to enable their power saving modes. These active idle power levels have nevetheless been growing with each new PCIe drive from Samsung.
Trim Validation
Strictly speaking, NVMe doesn't have the TRIM command. The NVMe Deallocate command is the equivalent to the ATA Trim command, and since the trimcheck tool relies on the OS and filesystem to issue the command, it works without modification on NVMe drives.
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Gigaplex - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
What you're proposing isn't actually booting the drive. It's chainloading. The assessment is accurate, and chainloading is a long standing practice for this type of problem. It's also a hack that has no business being used for general consumer usage.R3MF - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
does the supplied samsung driver work with Win7, and is its use as simple as pointing the windows installer to a USB thumbdrive at the appropriate point?Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
The Samsung NVMe driver was provided as an installer program. After running the installer, there was no need to explicitly change which NVMe driver was used for the 950 Pro. I tested it on Windows 7, 8.1, and 10.Badelhas - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I have a Vertex 3 128GB SSD. Do you guys believe I will see real world gains if I upgrade to the Samsung 950 Pro 256GB?MrSpadge - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
If your usage is "normal" for a desktop, I suspect "no" is the answer. Unless you're doing a side-by-side comparison. Watch the disk drive LED on your machine. If it's glowing constantly you're being limited by the storage, otherwise not. Or look at the drive load in task manager (shown since Win 8).III-V - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
>For starters, the 950 Pro's power consumption increases as it heats up, and I've seen its idle power climb by as much as 4.5% from power on to equilibrium.Er, yeah, that's how typical transistors work... they get leakier as they heat up :\
boogerlad - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
What is the latency difference between having this ssd connected directly to the cpu, and through the pch? I'm very curious but no one has tested this.TelstarTOS - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Performance is a bit of a mixed bag, but price/perf ratio is great.Waiting for intel countermove now :)
DIYEyal - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Does it suffer from similar thermal throttling issues as it's predecessors (SM951 and XP941)? I have seen people putting a heat sink on these and they report improvement in sustained performance.theMillen - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-ssd-950-pro-51... will answer any heat throttling questions you have, ie yes! but a simple fan solves them :-p