The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)
by Billy Tallis on October 22, 2015 10:55 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of heavy desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this review. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
Both 950 Pros deliver great performance on the destroyer, but the 512GB is outstanding. Clearly the more bursty nature of this test allows the drive to avoid any thermal throttling and deliver the high peak speeds that the PCIe interface is supposed to enable.
The NVMe drives deliver the lowest average service times, but the other PCIe drives are close behind. If there were any moments of thermal throttling like we saw with the performance consistency test, they would greatly inflate the average service time.
The very small number of performance outliers on this test is a good indicator that these drives don't sieze up under the pressure of an interactive workload.
When looking at the more strict latency threshold of 10ms, the 256GB 950 Pro is not significantly better than the good SATA drives, but the 512GB has extremely good control over latency.
Energy usage is not competitive with the high-performance SATA drives. As demanding as it is, The Destroyer still has opportunities for drives to scale back power consumption but the 950 Pro can't do that on our testbed.
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bill.rookard - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link
VERY interesting. Of particular note is the Crucial MX200 - an older drive, and connected via SATA which trades blows back and forth with the newer PCIe - nvme based drives. Wow, good stuff.Deders - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I think it was only PCIe drives that had long booting times like the Intel 750.Gigaplex - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
These are PCIe drives.Deders - Friday, October 23, 2015 - link
I mean slotted drives as the drive controller has to load from the deviceKristian Vättö - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
I have a 256GB 950 PRO in my system (AsRock Z170 Extreme 7) and boot time is about 8 seconds with ultra fast boot enabled in BIOS/UEFI.Jacerie - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Why would you go on about how awesome Skylake and the 100 series chipset are for PCIe connected drives and then use a Haswell chip and a Z97 board for the test rig? Time to go back to the bench.Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
The Haswell system is what I've got on hand to test with, and it's what allows my results to be directly comparable with the reviews from earlier this year.Skylake gives you PCIe 3 from the PCH, but on the testbed we always use an x16 slot directly off the CPU for PCIe SSDs, so we don't need Skylake to run the drive at PCIe 3 speeds.
Jacerie - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
Will you be posting a follow-up to highlight any controller differences with the newer hardware?MrSpadge - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
This is not a SATA controller we're talking about, it's PCIe. And there we have hardly seen any differences between different implementations over the years.hansmuff - Thursday, October 22, 2015 - link
May I humbly request an addition to the review to show performance AND issues when using a PCI Express 2.0 to M.2 adapter on an older platform like the P67A?