The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionately more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to the steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.
Performance of the 950 Pro is comparable to the SM951, which is to say that it's significantly better than everything else we've tested. The penalty when starting with a fill drive is a bit larger than normal, but simply being full isn't enough to tank the performance the way a sustained test can.
Average service time and latency outliers are vastly better than any SATA drive, but NVMe doesn't seem to make a huge difference.
The high performance comes with the price of high power consumption, and the total energy used over the course of this test is significantly higher than all the high-performance SATA drives we're comparing against.
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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?