The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTATTO - Transfer Size vs Performance
ATTO provides a quick and easy test of performance over a range of block sizes, which makes it a good overview of performance. It illustrates quite clearly how performance plateaus as transfer size increases, with reads bumping up against the limits of SATA but writes being limited by the speed of the flash itself.
AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance
Any drives that perform transparent compression will perform much worse on this test than the Iometer tests. The SandForce controllers that relied heavily on compression are much less popular (having been largely displaced by controllers from Silicon Motion, Marvell, and Phison), but this in still an important metric to keep in the suite. Many real-world sources of bulk data (such as encoded video) are already heavily compressed and cannot benefit from any attempts at further compression.
With a freshly-wiped drive and the short duration of the AS-SSD test, the drives perform much closer to their advertised speeds.
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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