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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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.