The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTATTO - Transfer Size vs Performance
ATTO provides a quick and easy test of performance over a range of block sizes, which makes it a good overview of performance. It illustrates quite clearly how performance plateaus as transfer size increases, with reads bumping up against the limits of SATA but writes being limited by the speed of the flash itself.
AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance
Any drives that perform transparent compression will perform much worse on this test than the Iometer tests. The SandForce controllers that relied heavily on compression are much less popular (having been largely displaced by controllers from Silicon Motion, Marvell, and Phison), but this in still an important metric to keep in the suite. Many real-world sources of bulk data (such as encoded video) are already heavily compressed and cannot benefit from any attempts at further compression.
With a freshly-wiped drive and the short duration of the AS-SSD test, the drives perform much closer to their advertised speeds.
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Chris023 - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
Just a little FYI for anyone that runs across this article. I'm planning a new build later this year so buy components I can use now toward that end. I just purchased the Samsung 950 pro boxed consumer version in 512GB. I Installed it with an adapter card in an old Asus M4a88TD-V EVO/USB3 motherboard. To my amazement the bios recognized and even put it in the boot sequence. I already had an 830 SSD. I booted up with the old SSD 830 and initialized this new 950. Then using Samsung's transfer software cloned the 830 to the 950. Rebooted, turned the 830 to disabled in the boot order, and enabled the 950 as the boot drive. It took two tries for me to realize I had to disable the 830 in the boot menu as the bios automatically looked for a bootable AHCI drive first. I have now been booting and running the 950 Pro for over a week with no issues. This is on an old AMD 880 chipset!!! This is a PCIe 2.0 MB! Even so it still manages to outperform the older Samsung 830 SSD enough to notice. User Bench shows my SSD performance going from 70% to 169% of average. This doesn't represent everyday usage but it does say what the potential is. Average will shoot up much higher once I get a true PCIe MB with native NVMe drive support. Should work nicely with a Z170 based MB. One more note is I'm using the Samsung NVMe driver and not the native Windows 10 driver.IAEInferno - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Longevity of the Samsung 950 pro?