The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of heavy desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this review. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
Both 950 Pros deliver great performance on the destroyer, but the 512GB is outstanding. Clearly the more bursty nature of this test allows the drive to avoid any thermal throttling and deliver the high peak speeds that the PCIe interface is supposed to enable.
The NVMe drives deliver the lowest average service times, but the other PCIe drives are close behind. If there were any moments of thermal throttling like we saw with the performance consistency test, they would greatly inflate the average service time.
The very small number of performance outliers on this test is a good indicator that these drives don't sieze up under the pressure of an interactive workload.
When looking at the more strict latency threshold of 10ms, the 256GB 950 Pro is not significantly better than the good SATA drives, but the 512GB has extremely good control over latency.
Energy usage is not competitive with the high-performance SATA drives. As demanding as it is, The Destroyer still has opportunities for drives to scale back power consumption but the 950 Pro can't do that on our testbed.
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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.