The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTMixed Random Read/Write Performance
Most real-world use consists of a mix of reads and writes, and interleaving the two often poses a particular challenge to drive controllers. This mixed random access test is conducted across a 16GB span of the drive, but on a full drive and with a queue depth of 3.
Mixed random access seems much improved over Samsung's earlier M.2 drives, and the 950 Pros fall behind only the Intel SSD 750. The 512GB drive is well behaved here and surpassing the 256GB drive as it should.
In this case, the higher power consumption of the 950 Pro is very well justified by the higher performance.
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There's not much variation across the different workloads. Performance hardly drops during the middle of the test where many controllers have trouble with a balanced mix, but on the other hand the performance at either end of the test is nothing spectacular. Power consumption climbs hand in hand with the proportion of writes, but is accompanied by some increasing in overall data rate.
Mixed Sequential Read/Write Performance
The queue depth of 3 is sufficient for many drives to perform very well at either end of this test, while testing 100% reads or 100% writes. In between, performance typically suffers greatly, and that's where the winners and losers of this test are determined. Anything that's duplicating duplicating or transforming a large amount of data on the drive will produce I/O patterns similar to this test. Creating a System Restore snapshot, backing up files to a different directory on the same drive, and file compression can all produce interleaved reads and writes of large blocks of data, though not necessarily fast enough to be limited by the drive's performance.
These sequential workloads allow the PCIe drives to stand out and achieve average speeds that would saturate SATA.
With power consumption in the same neighborhood as the SATA drives, the 950 Pro is significantly more efficient.
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Looking at the breakdown by workload, the 950 Pro performs well on the balanced mixes and far outstrips the SATA limit on the very read-heavy workloads and the pure write section at the end of this test.
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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.