The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTPerformance Consistency
Kicking things off, our performance consistency test saturates the drive with 4kB random writes for a full hour, with a queue depth of 32, the maximum supported by the AHCI protocol used by SATA and most PCIe drives. This puts the drive's controller under maximum stress and writes enough data to exhaust all free space and spare area on the drive. This is an unrealistic workload for any client use, but it provides a worst-case scenario for long-term heavy use, and it sheds light on how different SSD controllers behave and if their performance will hold up as they fill up.
The average of the last 400 seconds of the test gives us a steady-state IOPS rating that is usually very different from what the manufacturer specifies for a new, empty drive. We also quantify the consistency of the drive's random write performance, and provide plots of the performance over the course of the test.
Once steady state is reached, performance is determined more by the controller's algorithms than the interface speed, so it's not too surprising to see the 950 Pro performing similarly to other Samsung drives.
The consistency metric shows a surprising disparity between the two 950 Pros, with the 256GB performing much better.
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Comparing the graphs of the two 950s shows that the inconsistency of the 512GB drive comes from frequent jumps in performance above a solid baseline. This pattern holds even for the test with overprovisioning. Graphing the power consumption over time (not shown) reveals that the periods of lower performance have lower power. If the lower performance were due to periodic background garbage collection, then we would expect power consumption to be at least as high as when the drive is performing well. Instead, it appears that the 512GB drive is experiencing thermal throttling.
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With most of its time spent thermally limited, our 512GB sample's low average is explained. It appears that the thermal throttling mechanism is bumping the drive down to one of several discrete performance levels, rather than a continuous performance mechanism.
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ElBerryKM13 - Saturday, November 14, 2015 - link
If you had $1000 to spend which one would you get? this 950 pro m.2 or intel 1.2TB m.2?srieppo - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link
Get two 950 in RAID 0. I'm currently running that and it's amazing. What you should put money on depends on your needs though. For gaming SSD is not very important. But I already run 6700k with fast memory and 980TI SLI so was a logical next step.1TB of superfast SSD is the last bit. HDD for storage, power options to shut the HDD down when idle (silent) and online backup for important data is the way I like...
mapesdhs - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Typo on pp. 9, the word "duplicating" is shown twice, or was that a really late April Fool? :Dmapesdhs - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
Pondering whether to get a 950 Pro 256GB for a SkyLake laptop (MSI GE72 6QF). Despite the glowing benchmark results, it looks as if there would be little gain for real world usage compared to, say, an 850 EVO M.2 which is way cheaper (132 UKP for 500GB, vs. 147 UKP for 950 Pro 256GB), uses less power and thus would afford longer battery life. Edging towards the 850 EVO despite my nerdy addiction to speed...Killerkicker2011 - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link
Would the 950 pro work with my Macbook Pro Late 2013?Quarysma - Saturday, January 16, 2016 - link
I bought 950 pro but i having trouble rate. My system test results as follows:836 / 806 MB/s read/write.My system: Asus Z97m plus, 2*8 Corsair 2400 Mhz. i5-4690K, Corsair h110i, 1000W PSU.
I wonder why I'm having problems ?
Thanks for all...
robitlgnaz - Tuesday, February 2, 2016 - link
I have Asus Z97 deluxe with m.2 slot, but supporting only x4 PCI 2.0 (instead of x4 PCi 3.0).So on my mobo and yours too this m.2 support only 1.0Gbit or 1.000MB.;(
I think (and asking) that with PCIe adapter i and you can put that in x8 lanes of PCI 2.0 and get full spedd with that? I have only one graphics card so this is the only way, or?
Quarysma - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
Either we get PCI-e card or will switch to the DDR4 system. I moved to a DDR4 system.I'm ordered DDR4 system and waiting for the parts.
yury2808 - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Beware! This drive (950 Pro / 512 GB) is terribly slow, if you set your disk to be "compressed" in Win7/10. I used it save my vmware space for years with other SSD drives (intel/samsung/ocz) and never had an issue.But yesterday, we got 2x nvme 950 pro and found, that speed is dropping almost immediately to ... 3 MB/s with huge latency.
I don't know, how their firmware goes around benchmarks (which are all cool for 'incompressible' data) but for real life - this drive get a HUGE hit when OS compress data.
ps. sure, I have plenty CPU for it, so it's not the case.
Redstorm - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link
Be aware the new Samsung NVMe driver 1.1 drops performance by about 10% across the board. They should update the article with new perf numbers as its giving a false impression ATM.