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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Per Hansson - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
If you really need it FXi there is always the announced Samsung SM953 drive.It's 110mm long due to the inclusion of the tantalum capacitors, otherwise it's very similar to the SM951...
http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global/file/i...
R3MF - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
i was under the impression that win7 (install disk) does not support nvme, so i'm curious as to how you went about getting Win7 on a 950?Kristian Vättö - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
There is a hotfix NVMe driver available for Windows 7: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2990941blos - Monday, October 26, 2015 - link
I slipstreamed that hotfix (and almost 200 other fixes) using NTLite to a Win7SP1 image, wrote it back to usb, booted and it would still not allow me to install to a 951 NVMe drive... no drives found.Has anybody got this to work?
Windows 10 installs just fine but I have an unused W7 Pro license and I would really like to use it to active a W10 install.
I hear the next version of W10 will activate directly from W7 licenses... but hopefully that'll arrive in time before the W10 will really want the activation. Or perhaps re-arming to extend a bit?
Per Hansson - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
Yes it works but you need to integrate it in boot.wim as well.I made some details here about it, also nothing an errors that MS is still to fix in that KB article.
Even though I reported it a long time ago:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1543242/found-samsung-s...
blos - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
Ah that explains a lot, didn't know that the boot.wim was a different environment :)Quick search indicates that boot.wim integration is already available on the NTLite, so I guess it's playtime for this weekend :)
catavalon21 - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
The test system doesn't have a discrete video card. Would a high-powered video card impact the performance of the M.2 PCIe setup?AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
No.Caramonn - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
I've read the review and others and I guess I don't see a reason to get one of these drives yet. Am I missing something? It seems that the real world performance doesn't justify the nearly twice the cost as other Samsung SATA drives. I was really hoping that the rated speeds would translate into actual real world performance, but that doesn't appear to be the case.Tuishimi - Thursday, November 5, 2015 - link
$350... I could live with that. Sounds like a decent piece of hardware.