Samsung SSD XP941 Review: The PCIe Era Is Here
by Kristian Vättö on May 15, 2014 12:00 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2011
Back in 2011 (which seems like so long ago now!), we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on peak IO performance and basic garbage collection routines. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. Our thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives. The full description of the Heavy test can be found here, while the Light workload details are here.
The same goes for our 2011 Storage Bench: the XP941 is unbeatable. Only in the Light Workload test, the 8-controller OCZ behemoth is able to beat the XP941 by a small margin, but other than that there's nothing that can challenge the XP941. The consumer-oriented OCZ RevoDrive comes close but the XP941 once again shows how a good single controller design can beat any RAID 0 configuration.
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Ninhalem - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
I'm going to ask a slightly noob question: would it be possible to use these drives with the Z77 series if there was an update to the UEFI bios to recognize these drives in addition to Samsung providing the right drivers?wownotown - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
I have used a OCZ Revodrive for the last 2 years and love the performance over PCI-Express. Now that this is native with no bridge, it should be nice. Hopefully boot times improve with this tech. One the OCZ, you have a BIOS which adds 8 or more seconds to the boot time, which is nothing to complain about too much, but it would be nice to just boot into the OS, without the additional delays. I little pricey for me, but once competition enters the market, they will have to drop prices.landerf - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Could you please alert Samsung to the fact consumers will want these in black PCB color. As soon as one starts doing it the others will follow.dstarr3 - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
I'll never understand why anyone gives a toss what the inside of their computer looks like.pipja - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
some people have naked setups...Jay77 - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Doesn't one of the new Asrock Z97 boards have an M.2 connector that runs at pcie 3.0 x4? Stick that thing in there and see if boots!RamCity - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
On page two of this review, Kristian confirmed that the XP941 is bootable in the ASRock X97 Extreme6. They'll have a separate review of that motherboard in a review soon.RamCity - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
I mean ASRock Z97 Extreme 6!BMNify - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
MR city, do you happen to have any of those Everspin ST-MRAM DDR3 DIMMs has to hit equal density with consumer DIMMs aka these or their updates http://www.extremetech.com/computing/140318-eversp...id like you or anand (not while he's dunking biscuits in his tea OC :) to test them two/four sticks etc today and confirm they are far faster than NAND etc.... please
RamCity - Thursday, May 15, 2014 - link
Looks like interesting tech! Maybe there'll be a sneak preview at Computech in July.Rod