The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Out Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so application launch times and file load times are what dominate this test. Details of the Light test can be found here.
The Light test starts to show a distinct advantage for NVMe, and the Samsung UBX controller is performing much better than Intel's SSD 750.
The three Samsung NVMe drives have the lowest average service time and the SATA drives are all looking quite slow by comparison.
The PCIe drives are all very good about keeping latency outliers to a minimum, but none have yet managed to complete the entire test without any request taking more than 10ms.
Despite stellar performance, the 950 Pro's power efficiency is poor. If our system could make use of some power management capabilities this situation could be very different, but for many consumers this is just the way things are for PCIe drives. The lack of power management support may be slightly helping some of the latency scores, as transitioning between power states usually requires a short interruption in service.
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Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
If I'd had more time, I probably would have done more informal testing on some older machines. I can at least assure you that the drive doesn't seem to have any trouble in a PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 slot on my personal Haswell machine. Next time I'm poking around in my Lynnfield server I'll be checking how the pcie drives work, especially power management. But I probably won't do a full suite of performance tests, just enough to get a rough idea for how fast drives perform on a slower link. And I really don't have a clue when I'll get around to this, because I've still got quite the backlog of drives to review.hansmuff - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Understandable, thanks for the PCIe 2.0 update.The_Assimilator - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Thermal throttling is disappointing but shows that M.2, like SATA Express, is DOA. PCIe drives with heatsinks, or preferably U.2, is the future - hopefully with the Z200 series chipsets, manufacturers will ditch SATAe in favour of U.2 and we can finally get a worthy successor to SATA3.MrSpadge - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
DOA it certainly is not. You're free to attach a tiny RAM heatsink on the drive and be fine. Or simply forget about throtteling in real world usage (unless you use it in a server).Redstorm - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Under a normal client workload you don't get anywhere near triggering the thermal protection so adding heat sinks is not required. Agree SATA Express was still born. M.2 is far from it, if you look at any new release ultrabook you will find a M.2 SSD under the lid.The_Assimilator - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
M.2 is a great solution for replacing 2.5" SSDs in space-limited applications like ultrabooks, but for *absolute maximum performance without thermal throttling*, 2.5" U.2 drives a la Intel's 750 are still the way to go.zodiacfml - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
It depends on the designer on how much throttling they would allow or not. U.2 allows more freedom though but I reckon would be much more expensive and less dense in the future.user_5447 - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Why everyone keep saying that BIOS/UEFI must support NVMe to boot into OS?You can install GRUB bootloader on cheap small USB flash drive and use it to boot from NVMe drives on any system, since GRUB itself supports NVMe for few years now.
And yes, GRUB supports booting into Windows 8.1 / 10.
bji - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
They say it because it's true. Nobody wants to have to manage a USB drive just for booting their system. You can also install a floppy drive and boot from that, would you recommend that also? How about keeping a separate computer up constantly to support PXE booting from the network? Would you recommend that level of headache to someone who just wants to boot their frickin computer?bji - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
By the way, of all of the things I have to deal with when installing/upgrading Linux systems, grub is the most painful and problematic, by MANY orders of magnitude. I would *NEVER* recommend that a non-technical user have anything to do with grub, especially not for something as silly as booting a PC into Windows off of an NVMe drive.