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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
142 Comments
View All Comments
AntDX316 - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
we need REAL-WORLD performance than synthetic benchmarksthis is like how it is with DDR speeds but they do absolutely like nothing even though bandwidth is like 10x in spread difference
SmashingTool - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
" and in order to boot from an NVMe drive your motherborad's firmware needs NVMe support."^ Typo
Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Fixed! Thanks :)todlerix - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
How fast does the system boot with the 950 pros? I read the NVMe slows boot times down by a huge amount.Rajinder Gill - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Considering most people only the system once per day, the wait should not be considered an issue. If one BOOTs the machine many times per day, S3 sleep is a quick way back to the desktop.Rajinder Gill - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
*Considering most people only BOOT the system once per day, the wait should not be considered an issue.bji - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Even if I only boot my computer once per day, the time spent waiting for it to boot is annoying and I consider boot times important for that reason. When there is little other user-perceivable difference in SSD drives, a boot that happens 3 or 4 seconds faster is a significant factor.Makaveli - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
You know whats equally annoying people that sit and stare at boot screens lol.Go get a bagel, take a piss do something crying over 10 seconds isn't exactly productive.
Rajinder Gill - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
This is called being enthusiastic about the wrong thing. If getting to the desktop matters that much to one's productivity, then using S3 resume would be the "logical" thing to do.Rajinder Gill - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Shame on me for making a rational argument to irrational minds... ;)