Samsung Pro 950
Hold on to your digital hats, Jarred Walton takes the M.2 SSD for a spin.
Never mind the small size, M.2 drives have the potential to deliver a ton of performance in a compact form factor. This makes them ideal for Ultrabooks and other thin-and-light laptops, now desktop motherboards want in on the action as well. With SATA topping out at a theoretical 6Gbps, PCI-e is the way forward, and M.2 leverages the PCI-e bus to deliver up to 32Gbps. Add in support for NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express), an optimised protocol designed to let SSDs reach their full potential, and this looks like the way of the future.
So, what’s the problem? Until now, finding retail M.2 NVMe drives has been difficult and expensive. Samsung was the first to offer an M.2 PCI-e SSD with its XP941, and followed that with the SM951 earlier in 2015. Then it released the SM951 NVMe, a second iteration of the drive with NVMe support. Unfortunately, all of these were designed primarily for laptop and notebook vendors who were responsible for ensuring the necessary features were in place. You could find those drives online, but typically without a manufacturer warranty and at high prices. The Samsung 950 Pro aims to change all that with a five-year warranty plus stellar performance. The change of heart likely stems from Intel’s launch of Skylake [see Reviews, p18, LXF203] and the Z170 chipset, which allows desktop M.2 to reach its full potential.
M.2 isn’t the only solution for fast SSD storage, of course. U.2, formerly known as SFF-8639, aka SATA Express, will allow for more traditional 2.5-inch type form factors for SSDs, and there’s even M.2-to-U.2 adaptors. The problem for now is that drives with U.2 connectors are relatively scarce (even more so than M.2), and the cables and connectors needed for U.2 are rather bulky and inflexible.
In terms of price, there’s a big gulf between SSDs and HDDs, and a moderate gulf between SATA and NVMe SSDs. At the top of the ladder, the Intel SSD 750 is about £870 for 1.2TB SSD and around £300 for 400GB. The new 950 Pro is a bit better, priced at £150 for 256GB and around £270 for 512GB. If you’re wondering, the lowly hard drive continues to provide vast quantities of storage at bargain prices, going for 27p per GB—a full order of magnitude difference (with an equally large performance difference).
Great performance
Both the earlier Samsung SM951 and the new 950 Pro have a feature called Dynamic Thermal Guard. Under heavy workloads, it’s possible for the NAND chips and controller to heat up and malfunction, so the 950 Pro may throttle at times to avoid overheating.
We tested to see the raw read/write throughput and the read/write IOPS of the drive. Impressively our tests showed the drive outperforming Samsung’s own performance claims. At 2,301MB/s reads and 954MB/s writes, the Samsung Pro 950 is fast. The IOPS results also shows that the tests here were slightly better than the official figures with a 72,079 IOPS random read and 51,905 IOPS random writes.
The 950 Pro is fast, but it didn’t quite top the Intel SSD 750. Part of this is the smaller form factor of M.2, part of it is down to capacity and some of it is due to controllers and features. The SSD 750 is a performance monster, but it takes up a PCI-e slot and has a heatsink. In contrast, the 950 Pro is tiny and sits in between PCI-e slots.