The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTMixed Random Read/Write Performance
Most real-world use consists of a mix of reads and writes, and interleaving the two often poses a particular challenge to drive controllers. This mixed random access test is conducted across a 16GB span of the drive, but on a full drive and with a queue depth of 3.
Mixed random access seems much improved over Samsung's earlier M.2 drives, and the 950 Pros fall behind only the Intel SSD 750. The 512GB drive is well behaved here and surpassing the 256GB drive as it should.
In this case, the higher power consumption of the 950 Pro is very well justified by the higher performance.
 |
|||||||||
There's not much variation across the different workloads. Performance hardly drops during the middle of the test where many controllers have trouble with a balanced mix, but on the other hand the performance at either end of the test is nothing spectacular. Power consumption climbs hand in hand with the proportion of writes, but is accompanied by some increasing in overall data rate.
Mixed Sequential Read/Write Performance
The queue depth of 3 is sufficient for many drives to perform very well at either end of this test, while testing 100% reads or 100% writes. In between, performance typically suffers greatly, and that's where the winners and losers of this test are determined. Anything that's duplicating duplicating or transforming a large amount of data on the drive will produce I/O patterns similar to this test. Creating a System Restore snapshot, backing up files to a different directory on the same drive, and file compression can all produce interleaved reads and writes of large blocks of data, though not necessarily fast enough to be limited by the drive's performance.
These sequential workloads allow the PCIe drives to stand out and achieve average speeds that would saturate SATA.
With power consumption in the same neighborhood as the SATA drives, the 950 Pro is significantly more efficient.
 |
|||||||||
Looking at the breakdown by workload, the 950 Pro performs well on the balanced mixes and far outstrips the SATA limit on the very read-heavy workloads and the pure write section at the end of this test.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
142 Comments
View All Comments
user_5447 - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Yeah, just buy Skylake motherboard, CPU and DDR4 RAM.And I'm not saying that it's simple, I'm saying that it's possible. You don't have to do anything special after setting it up, just keep small USB drive plugged in at the back of your PC.
user_5447 - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Also, you can do it without additional USB drive, if you have at least one installed SATA device.Redstorm - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Still a crap solutionEssence_of_War - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I have had exactly two problems with GRUB.1) When windows destroys it because lolz.
2) When I was trying to install gentoo into a zfs root with on a luks encrypted disk.
Grub is fine and has been for a while.
SyukriLajin - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
windows shouldn't be able to mess with it if grub is installed on an external usb drive, and then setting the usb drive as the main boot device(all bios i've seen supports this). it's called chainloading, and it's not a bad hack if you don't have all the proper hardware but still want to try it. of course, it will require some technical knowledge. and because i'm poor, and can't afford a new system, if it works, it's good enough.hero4hire - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
If you're poor you wouldn't buy a nvme ssd. It is interesting to talk possibilities thoughEwitte12 - Saturday, October 24, 2015 - link
It didn't take much to figure out how to insert the nvme modules into a z87 motherboard. However I was prepared to replace it with a z97 if it messed up. I was NOT even considering the 600+ to go to skylake.Redstorm - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Because what you propose is not a very good solution at all.eddieobscurant - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
The problem with that theoretical solution (which i've tried) is that windows won't let you install on it when it lists the disk drives.If you migrate an installation from a sata drive, you get a bsod upon restart due to the different ahci/nvme drive required similar to the ahci/ide for sata drives.
So there isn't a solution
Gigaplex - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
You'd need to use the Windows deployment tools such as DISM to apply the WIM file, rather than run the regular install wizard.