Introduction, Specifications and Packaging
M.2 + NVMe + VNAND = Small and Speedy!
Introduction:
This is it. This is the day we have been waiting for. Ever since we feasted our eyes on the NVMe version of the Samsung SM951, we’ve been begging Samsung to release this as a consumer product. Bonus points if it was powered by their 3D VNAND technology. It took them a while, but they came through, officially announcing the 950 PRO exactly one month ago, and launching them today! Not only will we dive into the performance of this new model, we will also include its results in our new Latency Distribution and Percentile testing.
Specifications:
Nothing has changed since the announcement. All specs remain the same very impressive 2.2-2.5 GB/s reads, 0.9-1.5 GB/s writes, and upwards of 300k IOPS, all from an M.2 2280 SSD consuming only 7 Watts!
- 256GB – $199.99 ($0.78/GB) on Amazon.com
- 512GB – $349.99 ($0.68/GB) on Amazon.com
While the 950 PROs will work with the built-in Microsoft NVMe driver (present in Windows 8 and up), Samsung has also provided their own driver, which will increase performance. The same was true for the Intel SSD 750 Series.
Packaging:
There’s really not much to this packaging, but it’s the most ‘retail’ we’ve seen for packaging of a simple M.2 SSD.
Sorry I’m late. Beginning of
Sorry I’m late. Beginning of page 2 “Meing…” What’s Meing?
Thanks – fixed!
Thanks – fixed!
Wish my AM3+ would work with
Wish my AM3+ would work with this for boot 🙁 Waiting for Zen but might have to go X99.
I have an MSI Z97MX-Gaming 5
I have an MSI Z97MX-Gaming 5 motherboard with M.2 10gb/s slot. Is this fully compatible? Sorry, im very new to the whole m.2 thing. I currently have 2x Samsung 850 Pro 512gb in Raid 0 – would mind selling 1 or both and switching to this based on how god damn fast it is.
ya i agree they didnt exactly
ya i agree they didnt exactly make m.2 very easy to understand
I don’t think m.2 was really
I don’t think m.2 was really meant to be that consumer oriented. It has a large number of possible keying and interfaces (A through M). I suspect that they mostly designed it for mobile use without really expecting people to use it that much on the desktop. The SATA express connector looks like a total kludge though and a lot of boards do not have that many x4 or greater slots available, so this form factor makes a lot of sense. Although, I think they should have made a form factor closer to a memory module also. We may get that with Intel X-point or other next generation nonvolatile technology.
I don’t know what these guys
I don’t know what these guys did but look at this link page 3 of there review….95C….and throttling only 62 seconds with out fan….
http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-ssd-950-pro-512gb-nvme-pcie-ssd-review_174096/3
Definitely concerning enough
Definitely concerning enough to warrant a further look. Maybe slapping a heat spreader on there would help?
Found out today, Linux Kernel
Found out today, Linux Kernel 3.3+ all support NVMe !
While this is fast, I don’t
While this is fast, I don’t know if it is fast enough to justify price differences over an 850 pro. We have kind of reached a fast enough point unless we change how the device is used. Current systems are designed to access non-volatile storage as little as possible since the difference between DRAM and disk is many orders of magnitude. This makes it such that small changes in performance will make almost no difference in day-to-day use. Flash isn’t good enough to act like DRAM, so it will be stuck being accessed in a disk-like manner even through NVMe. Intel’s X-point may be fast enough and durable enough to actually be used more like DRAM, or at least fast enough to make it a separately defined level of the memory hierarchy. The NVMe software stack kind of makes flash a separate level, but it will still mostly be treated like disk due to the durability.
Unless you are a power user
Unless you are a power user (ie running loots of VMs etc) this drive is only for bragging rights. Having said that in about 3-4 years the application ecosystems will keep on developing apps that will push the limits of this drive. Asrock has an M.2 slot which they call ultra M.2. I would love to see how this performs on the Ulta M.2 slot. 5 years ago if you needed 300k IOPS you would have required high end Storage arrays with massive number of SAS 15k drive in RAID 0 to achieve that result.
The Asrock ” Ultra M2″ slot
The Asrock ” Ultra M2″ slot is a standard PCI-E gen 3 – 4x slot. Nothing ” Ultra” about it. They call it “Ultra” to differentiate with M2 slots that run on lower gen PCI-E
Probably too late to get an
Probably too late to get an answer, but I didn’t see anything about power loss prevention in the specs for these SSD’s.
Any of the tested Samsungs have anything in place to prevent data loss in case of sudden power loss?
Haven’t gotten a Samsung SSD since my 830 bricked due to this problem.
I don’t think it has power
I don’t think it has power loss prevention, but I don’t know for sure. Providing enough power to shutdown properly generally requires some relatively large capacitors. You can see them on the Intel 750 board, since it has plenty of room. The 750 in the 2.5 inch drive form factor has two boards, I believe, and it actually has cut outs to fit a capacitor. It would be difficult to fit a large capacitor on a tiny m.2 PCB. It is lower power than the competition, so it may be able to use a smaller capacitor, but it would probably still be difficult to make room. The m.2 standard was meant more for mobile, so it has strict size limits, including thickness. I would rather have a full PCIe card which wouldn’t have any thermal or component size issues.
I have the Intel 750 in one
I have the Intel 750 in one of my computers and is quite satisfied with it. It’s more for another of my computers I’m looking to get a new SSD for.
It’s unfortunate, but understandable, if the m.2 ssd’s don’t have caps for power loss prevention.
Power loss prevention is not
Power loss prevention is not the same as protecting 'data in flight'. A 750's capacitance can help it finish writes sent to it immediately prior to a power loss, but the only way that happens is if power is lost during heavy write activity. Even in that case, chances are the full lenght of the write is not completed (there would still be some data on the host that did not make it across the bus).
There is insufficient space on consumer M.2 SSDs for PLP. It just is what it is. Now that 830 you had bricked was likely the result of something other than just a power loss, as there would be *way* more reports of bricked drives if simply losing power during use resulted in a bricked drive.
hey i wanted to ask this for
hey i wanted to ask this for a long time to PCPer, i know this a “storage” area but, please consider this question :
is there anyone (a company like ASUS, Acer, DELL, or hell even Nixeus) even trying to build a 24″ 1080p 144Hz IPS G-SYNC/FreeSync monitor under 300$-350$?
G-SYNC / FreeSync either would work because we all know that in 2016 AMD and nVidia both would have tremendously powered GPUs that could easily overpower a 1080p screen which would cost less than 300$ !!!
I find it rather odd that you
I find it rather odd that you list “Power Consumption is half that of the closest competing NVMe SSD” as one of the Pros of this drive, yet your testing includes no power consumption data at all? I get that the “closest competing NVMe SSD” is the 2.5″ u.2/HHHL PCIe Intel 750, but looking at AnandTech’s review of the 950 Pro, the power consumption in most cases is disproportionately high even when compared to its stellar performance.
The 950 Pro has a similar
The 950 Pro has a similar power rating and construction to the SM951:
Anandtech tested idle consumption, and from the looks of it, their new editor is not testing DevSlp in their results. They also did not include the SSD 750 in their results (it draws more). In a desktop install, 1-4W idle draw from a high performance SSD is perfectly acceptable. Mobile installs implement DevSlp, which allows most SSDs to dive even deeper into shutdown and draw near-negligible power, at the expense of added first-IO latency as the controller spins back up.
Would like to send my thanks
Would like to send my thanks for the review, by far the most concise published to date and also with comparisons of all relevant drives included, many sites seem to have omitted the SM951 NVMe for example.
May I ask which driver you were using for testing? Apologies if this missed this info but is’s rather late here and have had a number of beers..
All 950 PRO testing was done
All 950 PRO testing was done with a beta version of the Samsung NVMe driver installed. Performance is decent but lower when using the MS inbox driver.
Any idea when Magician 4.8
Any idea when Magician 4.8 will be out and the non beta NVMe driver will be available….I would guess by the time they are available for retail, and thanks for the Great review. Oh buy the way there sure is a lot of differences in reviews on temps and throttling any Idea why?
Not sure really. All review
Not sure really. All review samples came from (literally) the same batch / box. I can only speak for our own results, and promise that I was intentionally trying to make these throttle. From what I have seen in my testing, I would have no issue putting one of these in my own system / usage with zero airflow over it.
Thanks Alan, I have a 200mm
Thanks Alan, I have a 200mm fan blowing in on my case (Corsair 650D) and the Hyper M.2 adapter card will be right in front of the fan about 18 inches away, so it should have pretty good airflow…Going to go for it, just waiting for W10 Threshold 2 to come out on November 2 to install it!
Magician 4.9 is out and also
Magician 4.9 is out and also the driver http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/downloads.html
and to top it off MSFT has a
and to top it off MSFT has a driver for it, or generically for NVMe now? I just bought a 6700k and a Gigglebyte UD5 mobo, they were delivered yesterday, I haven’t even unpacked it all nor started building but be assured I’ll be debating hard whether 650 goes on these or a 980ti about the time I’m ready to make my next upgrade – guess it will depend if I sell even more ham radio gear to buy computer parts. 😀
Windows 8 and up has a built
Windows 8 and up has a built in NVMe driver, but it's like using a built in GPU driver. It works but you won't get the best possible performance.
pre-ordered the 512GB version
pre-ordered the 512GB version today. next week can’t come soon enough!
swapping out my sm951 256GB ahci
We’ve gone from SATA3 to PCIe
We’ve gone from SATA3 to PCIe and the next step up I see today are Memory card slots. It might be interesting to see controllers that could exploit DDR addressing or maybe even a new type of slot for storage style memory.
Pipe dreaming- but the lines are blurring.
Plugging in some next gen
Plugging in some next gen storage into an unused memory slot….well it’ll defiantly be faster than PCiEx4, and the Enterprise x8 @ 6GB/s
No idea if they could make a controller that would be able to bridge that miss-mash but it sure would be fast.
While we are pipe dreaming – why for the love of sanity, don’t they use rechargeable ML2032 (instead of the CR2032) on MB/s
Intel already announced
Intel already announced something like this.
http://www.theplatform.net/2015/10/28/intel-shows-off-3d-xpoint-memory-performance/
So, an ITX MB, an R9 Nano,
So, an ITX MB, an R9 Nano, some enthusiast class processor, an SFF PSU, this SSD. We’d have to hear from a case maker with a small enough case because the ones sold currently are too big. Wooh.
Can’t wait to see how SFF PCs look in 1 year or 2.
Interesting review. Would
Interesting review. Would like to have seen a SanDisk included in this review. As for WD buying SanDisk……what a loss for SanDisk users. By chance I own a WD HDD and two have surface corruption ! No one is that unlucky.
But no reporting of DX12 multi-adapter ? I guess it must be hard for you Nvidia fanboys to report on the recent successes of AMD GPU’s.
The Sandisk samples we have
The Sandisk samples we have on hand were not comparable in performance.
The previous iterations of PCPer.com were:
We also just did a piece covering practical installation of the Nano into SFF cases, and even detailed how to modify a case which had caused a Nano to thermally throttle in its stock form. Seemed a more appropriate thing to cover than the *one* game that supports the niche configuration of running opposing GPU vendors simultaneously. I'd rather just deal with a single vendor and their associated driver quirks, and I suspect a majority of gamers would agree. It may be a bigger deal in the future, but for now we are focusing our energy on more important content.
Nice try on the accusation though. Trolling a non-GPU topic with that comment was also a nice touch.
The Samsung NVMe driver is up
The Samsung NVMe driver is up at the Samsung site for the 950 Pro…
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/downloads.html
can I use this and boot in a
can I use this and boot in a Dell Xps 15 (the new skylake one)?
Hi Allyn, thanks a lot for
Hi Allyn, thanks a lot for the review. I would like to know which block size you chose during your HD Tune’s benchmark. When I run the benchmark with its default block size which is 64 KB, I get low reading speed (less than 900 mb/s). But 8 MB of block size gives 2250 mb/s.
Best regards