The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionately more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to the steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.
Performance of the 950 Pro is comparable to the SM951, which is to say that it's significantly better than everything else we've tested. The penalty when starting with a fill drive is a bit larger than normal, but simply being full isn't enough to tank the performance the way a sustained test can.
Average service time and latency outliers are vastly better than any SATA drive, but NVMe doesn't seem to make a huge difference.
The high performance comes with the price of high power consumption, and the total energy used over the course of this test is significantly higher than all the high-performance SATA drives we're comparing against.
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herbc - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
How fast do you really need to be happy with using a computer is my question , my computer is faster now than i actually need it to be and all it has is a current SSD .Woff - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
I have a system with Asus X99 DeLuxe motherboard and a I7-5960X cpu. I use a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD connected to one of the SATA ports, but I want to upgrade this device to a M.2 Samsung 950 Pro. The motherboard offers two ways to connect a M.2 but I don't know witch is the best alternative. The X99 has a on-board M.2 (socket3) but is also delivered with a expansion card, a 'HYPER M.2 x4' card. Anyone who can help me with the best (fastest) solution to my problem?Redstorm - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
You should be OK to use the Onboard M.2 slot as the manual says "32Gb transfer for the onboard M.2" page 'x' so 4 x PCIe 3.0cjelliott - Tuesday, November 17, 2015 - link
How did you get on with this 950 Pro SSD on the X99 Deluxe? Can you boot from it? I am tempted to buy this SSD but have seen a lot of forums where people are having trouble. I want to install and boot Win 10 Pro from it.l_d_allan - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
Hmmmm ... the Samsung Galaxy review was at the top for 5 days, then one day for an ASUS mother board, and only one day for the Surface 4, and now several days for the Samsung PCie SSD.Seems unbalanced. Or just "the luck of the draw"?
Kristian Vättö - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
Usually content is only released on weekdays, so reviews that go up later in the week (e.g. on Thursday) may get several days of page time. Oftentimes the content release is dictated by an embargo lift, so the time of publishing isn't on AnandTech's hands.I can assure you that this is just a coincidence - there's no rule or contract that a certain company must get X number of days at the top. Frankly, it wasn't even something we thought about during my time at AnandTech as content always went up when it was ready and free for publishing.
Craig234 - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
"The Intel SSD 750 clearly needs to come down in price to be completely sidelined by the 950 Pro. "I think you mean to AVOID being completely...
TheBeagle - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
I case anybody is interested, Amazon.com has this lovely items for sale (pre-order) right now. The Amazon web site says the product will be released for sale on Thursday, October 29th. Hurry up before they're all gone - LOL! BeagleFXi - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
I know it's not a lot of space but some degree of power loss protection would have been proper for a "pro" device in this price category.Kristian Vättö - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
The 950 PRO, just like all Samsung client SSDs, do journaling to protect the FTL against sudden power losses. Protection for cached user data is not really needed since modern file systems have been designed to withstand minor data losses (HDDs also use DRAM to cache writes, so SSDs are no different in that sense).