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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AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
This 5,600-word review utterly fails to penetrate to the bottom-line answer: the 950 Pro gives virtually zero desktop-usage performance advantage, while costing more than double of SATAIII drives. That only took 17 words.http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro...
Redstorm - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Quote: "Lucky for that Samsung 950 Pro SSD or i would never have made that head shot" - said no one ever.PVG - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I don't want to believe you tested a PCIe 3.0 4x drive on a board with a PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 socket, so I'm guessing you used some kind of PCIe card adapter hooked up to the 3.0 lanes from de CPU, right?Billy Tallis - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
Yep. We're always using the PCIe lanes off the CPU, and with a riser card and adapter that allows for the power measurement.PVG - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
That sounds like a cool setup. You should show it, sometime. ;)zodiacfml - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
I'm just impressed with the SM951. All these PCIe drives are not terrible and gives excellent performance over SATA anyway. Their differences are pretty negligible in real world use. The challenge now (esp. for Samsung) is more capacity and lower prices.I can't shake the idea of NAS devices with M.2 drives.
zodiacfml - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
Additionally, NVMe doesn't improve much for the clients. It seems like a specification they added on consumer drives to increase its adoption to benefit their server/enterprise storage products.wyewye - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
Billy, you shit the bed: half of graphs are randomly missing Intel 750, the only competing consumer drive.However, good job on highlighting the termal issues of 950 Pro.
lilmoe - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
Welcome to the world of amazingly consistent charts, brought to you by Anandtech.SyukriLajin - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
who knew that storage would require bandwidth as high as a graphic card. just a few years ago, it's the slowest component of your computer.