The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)

AnandTech 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.