Samsung 950 Pro M.2 512GB
All your SSD are belong to us
THIS IS IT, RIGHT? The daddy of SSDs. The storage solution to rule them all? The Samsung 950 Pro M.2 512GB certainly looks seriously hot on paper. It all starts with the form factor. It’s an M.2 drive, which is rapidly becoming the weapon of choice for high-performance desktop storage.
Of course, it supports the new NVMe storage protocol, and does its high-bandwidth thing via a quad-lane PCI Express 3.0 interface, which allows for GB/s rather than mere MB/s of raw bandwidth. At 512GB, it’s big enough to store more than just your OS and a few apps, too.
Oh, and it’s a Samsung drive, and Samsung is arguably the most innovative of SSD makers. In fact, it’s one of the very few SSD makers that does everything itself. NAND memory, controller chipset, firmware, assembly, the lot.
In this case, you get Samsung’s UBX controller chipset and fancy 3D NAND memory. The claimed performance is consequently spectacular: 2.5GB/s for reads and 1.5GB/s writes are the headline figures, but the 300,000 read IOPS claim is a bit of an eyebrow tweaker, too. Anyway, it all begs the obvious question. What’ll she do, mister?
In benchmarks such as ATTO and CrystalMark, you’ll get peak sequential numbers quite near the claimed performance. In other words, really big numbers. In terms of random access performance, there’s a similarly big leap over conventional SATA drives, with 4K read speeds around the 200MB/s mark. Write speeds are only slightly better than a SATA drive, at about 50MB/s.
However, the 950 doesn’t play so nicely with the AS SSD benchmark if you’re using the default Windows NVMe driver. Samsung’s own NVMe driver tidies things up. Back in the real world, the 950 delivers the fastest time in our file copy test, at just 43 seconds. Compare that to over six minutes for the slowest SATA drive, and you get an idea of just how much more performance potential this offers.
So it’s seriously quick, the 950 Pro. But remember, you need a motherboard that offers a proper four-lane PCIe M.2 slot to make the most of its awesome performance.
Samsung 950 Pro M.2 512GB
ALL YOUR BASE Crazy-fast all-around performance; cutting-edge hardware.
SET US UP THE BOMB Not exactly cheap; unspectacular 4K read performance. $ 329, www.samsung.com