Samsung 950 Pro M.2 512GB
TEN DRIVES, three format factors, and a whole lot of benchmarks. But what have we learned? For starters, it’s obvious that this brave new age of PCI Express storage throws up compatibility problems.
During the SATA era, you could buy pretty much any SSD and sling it into your rig, confident that it wouldn’t just be physically compatible, but that you would also be able to boot from it. That’s not true with drives that use the PCI Express interconnect and the NVMe control protocol. M.2 and U.2 drives require ports and connectors that may not be present on your motherboard.
Likewise, while pure PCI Express SSDs, such as Intel’s 750 Series, will physically plug into almost any board, you’ll need support for the NVMe protocol. That’s far from guaranteed with any given motherboard. And the older the board, the less likely you are to be in luck. All of which means that the supposed choice between many of these drives may be academic, short of a major system upgrade.
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It also means that SATA drives aren’t dead. Not for a lot of us. In that category, the relative duds are the Kingston SSDNow V300, the OCZ Trion 100, and the Crucial BX200. All of them stumble when it comes to sustained data transfers. As it happens, the ability to keep on trucking is what makes SanDisk’s SSD PLUS budget drive so impressive. If you want a decent drive that’s seriously cheap, it’s a nice choice.
Of the mid-range SATA offerings, it’s a surprisingly tightly fought contest between our established SSD honey, the Samsung 850 EVO, and Kingston’s HyperX Savage. For pure SSD properties, we would happily take the Samsung over the Kingston. As an overall package, however, the Kingston’s extras—including that useful USB 3.0 enclosure—are mighty appealing. Pay your money, take your pick. As for the Samsung 850 Pro, it’s as good as SATA drives get, but at a price, especially in 2TB format.
Moving on to the PCI Express category, Kingston’s Predator carves out a nice little niche for itself, thanks to omitting support for the NVMe control protocol. That probably compromises its performance a little bit, but it also broadens motherboard compatibility. It’s an interesting drop-in option for systems that don’t support NVMe, even if you still need to take care regarding compatibility and bootability. Due diligence before purchase is a must.
And so it ultimately comes down to two drives fighting it out for the title of the hottest, the fastest, the downright best solid-state drive in town. Yup, our final decision is between Intel’s 750 Series and the Samsung 950 M.2. For some, the choice may be dictated by form factor. Both drives support NVMe, but the Intel offering is compatible with a wider range of motherboards, thanks to being a simple PCI Express board, rather than an M.2 card. It’s the obvious choice if your motherboard supports NVMe but lacks an M.2 slot. However, if we were building our ultimate PC from scratch, M.2 compatibility would be a given. So there can be only one—it’s the awesome Samsung 950 Pro.