Samsung 950 ssd review: The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review (256GB and 512GB)

Samsung 950 Pro 512GB Review

This article has been updated from the original, with new data on 950 Pro performance using Samsung’s NVMe driver.

Introduction

Not too long ago, we staged a comprehensive solid-state drive shootout showcasing some of the most popular SSD models on the market, comparing them to a few “classics” from generations ago to demonstrate what modern SSDs can do for PC builders and modders. Well, OK, it was mostly comprehensive, but there was one drive we didn’t yet have in our collection that we really wanted to test: the Samsung 950 Pro 512GB. This drive really needs no introduction, as it’s been the favorite of critics and enthusiasts from the moment it hit (or should we say conquered?) the market. We really wanted to know how it would do, so we decided to do the honorable thing: we went out and bought one.

Truth be told, we already had a sense of how it would perform in our benchmark suite, because we’d tested its predecessor, the Samsung SM951. And that drive had impressed in some benchmarks, while appearing fairly average in others. Not to spoil the fun too much, but the same is going to be true of the 950 Pro. Keep in mind that all modern SSDs already have more than sufficient throughput to just about saturate the SATA bus, as well as to move the small bits of data required for OS and app loading without breaking a sweat. The 950 Pro is really designed to do something different, and something different it does, as you’ll soon see.

Description and Features

Here are all the drive you’ll see in our benchmarks, including the 950 Pro:

1. Solid-State Drive #1: Samsung 850 Evo 500GB M.2 (the fastest SATA-based M.2 drive on the market)
2. Solid-State Drive #2: Dual Samsung 850 Evo 500GB Drives in RAID0 (using a pair of 2.5″ SATA drives)
3. Solid-State Drive #3: OCZ Trion 150 960GB (representing the latest in big-capacity, low-cost drives)
4. Solid-State Drive #4: Crucial MX200 1TB (Crucial’s fastest drive, now discontinued in favor of the MX300 1TB)
5. Solid-State Drive #5: Samsung SM951 256GB PCIe (precursor to the Samsung 950 Pro)
6. Solid-State Drive #6: Samsung 950 Pro 512GB PCIe (both with the default Microsoft NVMe driver and Samsung’s NVMe driver)

Note that The 850 Evo, Trion 150, and MX200 all use a standard SATA interface (whether through a SATA connector or an M. 2 slot), while the SM951 and 950 Pro use the PCIe x4 interface also embedded in M.2 slots on current-gen motherboards. They install as easily as a stick of RAM, as shown below. Note that not all M.2 slots support PCIe x4 (for example, the Z97 chipset only supported PCIe x2), and importantly, not all M.2 slots support SATA either (most notoriously, it’s absent from M.2 slots on the high-end X99 chipset). To make things just a bit more confusing, the 950 Pro has yet another layer of advancement beyond just PCIe and M.2: it uses the NVMe protocol, which is in the process of replacing the older AHCI protocol originally developed for mechanical hard drives. For truly complex I/O operations, NVMe can provide a serious boost. But not everything PC users do is all that complex, which means NVMe doesn’t always have an advantage. We tested our six drives using a mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks that we believe draws out both the distinctions and similarities between the various models, as well as areas of strength and weakness of specific models.

Test Setup

To put the 950 Pro to the test, we used our newest benchmarking rig, equipped with the following components:

1. CPU: Intel Core i7-6900K @4.4GHz
2. Motherboard: Asus X99-Pro/USB3.1
3. Memory: G.Skill 4x8GB Ripjaws V DDR4-3200
4. Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 SC 8GB
5. Power Supply: EVGA Supernova 1000 PS
6. CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro h200i v2
7. Case: SilverStone Primera PM01
8. Operating System: Windows 10 Home Download

While benchmark jockeys will always test their SSDs empty, results generated this way are truly meaningless. Without data on them, SSDs can’t serve much purpose, can they? So we filled each of our drives to 50% of their capacity to run all of our tests.

Note that when we originally published this article, we used the default Microsoft NVMe storage controller drivers that ship with Windows 10, creatively named the “Standard NVM Express Controller”, as shown here. As it turns out, these standard drivers in fact hold back the 950 Pro, which is cutting-edge enough that it requires custom storage controller drivers to achieve its peak performance. The NVMe drivers are for the motherboard’s storage controller, not the SSD itself, and are available on Samsung’s website.

Confusingly, Samsung’s drivers are much older than Microsoft’s, which probably were updated for the “Anniversary Update” to Windows 10, but for whatever reason didn’t build in the necessary refinements required to accelerate the 950 Pro. We want to make clear that we do not think this is an ideal approach going forward, as systems with multiple NVMe devices could end up requiring conflicting drivers. Samsung is in the driver’s seat when it comes to high-performance NVMe drives, however, so it can pull this off for now, but we hope that going forward a motherboard’s storage controllers don’t need to be changed based on which brand of device you install. You can see confirmation that Samsung’s drivers are installed below:

Let’s now move onto our tests to see how the 950 Pro compares to the competition we set out for it, starting with some theoretical benchmarks!

Benchmark Performance

To generate the benchmark results on this page, we used Samsung’s SSD Magician software, which can benchmark just about any drive, be it Samsung, another brand, or even a mechanical hard drive.

Ah, the Sequential Read benchmark, the one every SSD manufacturer loves to trot out as often as possible. And for PCIe-based drives like our Samsung models, it’s a chance to really shine. You see, the SATA III interface has bottlenecked SSDs for several years now, and it took PCIe to really let them show their stuff. If Samsung released an 850 Evo on the PCIe interface, we can guarantee you it would perform similarly to the SM951 and 950 Pro. But then Samsung would have to sell it for close to the price of a standard 850 Evo. And that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Samsung has taken advantage of the opportunity to create a new price class here, and it’s going to do its best to promote this particular benchmark result to justify charging a pretty penny for its top drives.

The Sequential Write benchmark mirrors the Sequential Read benchmark, except for the fact that the 950 Pro’s larger 512GB memory footprint allows it to take advantage of a greater number of memory channels. That giives it an opportunity to pull ahead of its SM951 256GB cousin. Again, both PCIe-based drives leave the SATA-based drives in the dust. although here our RAID0 array isn’t too far behind.

The Random Read benchmark, quite simply, is the most important of all canned benchmarks you’ll find, especially for comparing SSDs intended for use as OS drives. Loading Windows relies very heavily on random reads, and barely at all on sequential reads. If you’re choosing a system drive, and you can only get your hands on specs, this one is worth paying attention to. The 950 Pro does well here, beaten only by its older cousin, the SM951, at least until you install Samsung’s “special sauce” NVMe driver, which just catches up to the AHCI-based SM951. Both PCIe-based drives are at least 10% faster than any SATA drive.

It seems there’s something other than drive speed holding back our SSDs in the random write test, as most hit nearly identical marks. But with the enhanced NVMe driver, the 950 Pro is able to beat the mighty combo of two 850 Evo drives in RAID0. Even so, the result here isn’t entirely ground-breaking, and if you consider that randomly writing small bits of data doesn’t require too much out of an SSD, this begins to make sense.

Real-World File Copy Performance

This is the test we’ve all been waiting for. Could the 950 Pro’s big sequential numbers translate into equally-impressive throughput when reading and writing to the drive simultaneously? In a word, yes. The 950 Pro is in a class of its own, finishing this task a whopping 10% faster than the already-fast SM951. And how does it compare to its cousin the 850 Evo, which costs about half as much? Well, here the 950 Pro proves its worth, trimming 20 seconds off the copy time. Note that when we first ran this benchmark on the 950 Pro with the Windows NVMe driver, we hit a copy speed of 38 seconds, but we were never able to replicate that, so we’ve updated the time here.

This benchmark truly demonstrates the power of the 950 Pro, and being a real-world test can be taken at face value, unlike marketing specs. And to power users who are installing lots of apps on a regular basis or need a blazing-fast swap drive for HD photo and video work, this is going to translate to a lot of saved time.

Application Loading Performance

We end with some application loading data, using two of our favorite games, Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3. Note that we’ve dropped our RAID0 setup for this comparison, as it doesn’t have an advantage here. We think the data below will demonstrate why.

Uh oh, our knight in shining armor has an Achilles’ heel. This is the real world folks, and we restarted our PC multiple times to get a bunch of clean test runs on the 950 Pro, just to make sure these numbers were right. Remember that closing and then re-launching an app isn’t representative of an SSDs performance, due to caching. The 950 Pro just can’t get ahead of the pack, even with the enhanced NVMe device driver.

More disappointment for 950 Pro fans, ourselves included. App launching just isn’t playing to the 950 Pro’s strengths.

To illustrate why the 950 Pro’s massive throughput can’t propel it to a solid lead in these benchmarks, below we’ve provided a drive activity trace for the 950 Pro while loading Battlefield 4:

To put it simply, the drive is only stressed for a few short moments during the game load sequence. If this were a mechanical hard drive, those periods would be drawn out significantly, as hard drives can’t keep up with the game engine. But any SSD can do a pretty good job of moving the necessary data up and out, so there’s probably still more to be done to ensure that NVMe performs at least as well as AHCI during simple routines like this.

We want to be clear here: in no way does this take away from the 950 Pro’s impressive class-leading performance in truly-intensive I/O operations. Don’t buy a 950 Pro to load apps faster than any other SSD, buy it because it’s so much faster when moving lots of data!

Conclusion

In order to fairly evaluate the 950 Pro, we have to consider its cost in comparison to more run-of-the-mill drives.  Below you’ll find the price of each of the drives we tested as of our publication date, along with a $/GB figure:

1. Samsung 850 Evo 500GB M.2 ($170) – $0.34/GB
2. Dual Samsung 850 Evo 500GB Drives in RAID0 (2x$157) – $0.31/GB
3. OCZ Trion 150 960GB ($210) – $0.22/GB
4. Crucial MX200 1TB ($329) – $0.32/GB
5. Samsung SM951 256GB PCIe ($180) – $0.70/GB
6. Samsung 950 Pro 512GB PCIe ($312)  – $0.61/GB

Well, there’s no doubt about it: the 950 Pro isn’t a particularly good value proposition, especially if all you want is a system that will boot and launch apps quickly. It costs nearly three times as much per gigabyte as the budget Trion 150, which can keep up with the 950 Pro is low-stress tests like app launching. But then again, SSDs have been good at that for years. What the 950 Pro brings to the table is absolutely massive throughput when pushed well beyond what users typically do day-to-day on their PCs. Unmatched sequential throughput thanks to the PCIe x4 interface along with the efficiency of the NVMe protocol, at least when under fire, means that it can move files like nobody’s business. It’s nearly twice as fast as our two 1TB-class drives, the OCZ Trion 150 and Crucial MX200. If you’re a power user, that’s the kind of performance boost worth paying for, making the cost of the 950 Pro seem downright reasonable.

So, overall, we really like the 950 Pro in the sense that it’s a showcase of all that an SSD can offer using the most modern of technologies. It’s the fastest drive we’ve ever tested. But we are in the business of handing out sound advice to our readers, not marketing mumbo-jumbo or press releases, and the truth is that before you put a 950 Pro in your system, you should seriously consider starting with a larger, cheaper drive, which may provide similar performance in many of the metrics you care about.

And just a word here about our 850 EVO RAID array. If you routinely save or transfer large files, for instance in the course of high-resolution photo or video editing, RAIDed SATA SSDs are a great option, as they come close to the speed of PCIe-based drives for a fraction of the price, while offering the potential for much more capacity. But please take our advice and never run an OS off of a RAID0 array, nor maintain important files on a RAID0 array without a backup. It’s just not worth the effort or the risk. Our RAID array was lost during our most recent motherboard firmware update, a known issue on Asus motherboards, and a risk you take whenever you’re working with RAID0. If your PC workflow demands tremendous throughput and rock-solid data integrity, the 950 Pro is going to be the obvious choice.

OK, that’s all for now, folks. As always, if you’re looking to build a new PC, you’ll find all of our recommended SSDs, as well as the rest of our favorite components, in our Do-it-Yourself PC Buyer’s Guides, updated monthly!

Samsung SSD 950 PRO Review

Every year Samsung releases a brand new SSD product and this year is no exception. For 2015, Samsung introduces the world’s first (another one) NVMe PCIe SSD the Samsung 950 PRO [official 950 Pro page].

The 950 PRO is basically assembled with the best components and features that Samsung SSD has to offer to date. The board and the controller are from the OEM SM951-NVMe while the memory are from the gen2 3D V-NAND fitted in the 850 PRO series. Also counted as an upgrade are the 512MB of LPDDR3 vs the LPDDR2 cache.

Performance wise, the 512GB version is the fastest between the two, clocking at 2.5GB/s sequential read and 1.5GB/s sequential write compared to the 256GB model raching 2.2GB/s in sequential read and 900MB/s in sequential write.

Those are amazing numbers when considering that SATA 3 SSD drives maxed out at 550MB/s!

Specifications

Samsung SSD 950 PRO

Usage Application	Client PCs
Capacity	256GB, 512GB
Dimensions (LxWxH)	Max 80.15 x Max 22.15 x Max.2.38 (mm)
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x4 (up to 32Gb/s) NVMe 1.1
Form Factor	M. 2(2280)
Controller	Samsung UBX controller
NAND Flash Memory	Samsung 32 layer 3D V-NAND
DRAM Cache Memory	512MB LPDDR3
Performance*		256GB	512GB
	Sequential Read:	Up to 2,200 MB/s	Up to 2,500 MB/s
	Sequential Write:	Up to 900 MB/s	Up to 1,500 MB/s
	4KB Random Read (QD1):	Up to 11K IOPS	Up to 12K IOPS
	4KB Random Write (QD1):	Up to 43K IOPS	Up to 43K IOPS
	4KB Random Read (QD32):	Up to 270K IOPS	Up to 300K IOPS
	4KB Random Write (QD32):	Up to 85K IOPS	Up to 110K IOPS
Weight	Max. 10g (512GB)
Power Consumption	Active average/maximum: 5. 1W/6.4W (256GB), 5.7W/7.0W (512GB)
	Idle: 70mW
	DEVSLP(L1.2 mode): 2.5mW

Samsung SSD 950 PRO Features

TRIM Support	Yes (Requires OS Support)
Garbage Collection	Yes
S.M.A.R.T	Yes
Data Security	AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption (FDE)
	TCG Opal Family Spec and eDrive (IEEE1667) to be supported by FW update
Reliability	MTBF: 1.5 million hours
TBW	256GB : 200TB, 512GB : 400TB
Temperature	Operating:	0°C to 70°C
	Non-Operating:	-40°C to 85°C
Humidity	5% to 95%, non-condensing
Vibration	Non-Operating:	20~2000Hz, 20G
Shock	Non-Operating:	1500G, duration 0. 5m Sec, 3 axis
Warranty	5 years limited

Pricing

Internals and Features

The device is single-sided, meaning all components are stacked on one side of the PCB. Under the sticker are two 32 layer 128Gb memory V-NAND package, one 512MB LPDDR2 RAM cache and the UBX controller ARM Cortex-R4 3-core 8 channel at 500 Mhz.

The biggest drawback with a high-speed clock controller is cooling. Compound with the fact that the M.2 slot on most of the motherboards are located between two PCIe slots where the air flow may not reach. The heat issue is addressed with the “Dynamic Thermal Guard” which basically reduce the clock speed to prevent data loss and/or hardware damage. I wonder if it is worth to use some memory heatsinks and thermal tape on all 3 chips (2 V-NAND and the controller) to help with cooling.

V-NAND

Introduced with the 850 PRO, the 3D V-NAND revolutionized the SSD industry. I already detailed the specific in the 850 PRO review, but here are the essentials. Up to the V-NAND, the race was about shrinking the die, cramming more and more cells in the same space. On one hand, costs are reduced and prices drop. On the other hand, as the cells are getting closer and closer, error rates increased and writes required higher voltage.

Instead of shrinking, V-NAND stacks vertical layers. By going vertical, there are now more real estates for the cells in size and in between. Which translates into more room for voltage state changes, less interference and lower programming voltage. The benefits are, fewer retries due to interferences, lower power consumption, increase NAND endurance and overall I/O performance

Although Windows 8. 1 and 10 provide native driver for NVMe drives, most of the Magician feature will require Samsung custom drivers. At the time of the review, an executable beta version of the drivers was provided.

Software Package

“Samsung Data Migration” is a convenient disk cloning software by Clonix. The utility will always detect the OS drive as the source, which is a good failsafe. It only works if at least one SSD is a Samsung. At this time, it is Windows only. The latest version 2.7 puts a new restriction, it only recognized Samsung SSD as the target drive, meaning I can not choose a non-Samsung SSD drive as a target.

The previous version would only care if at least one drive was a Samsung product. Although the Samsung Data Migration will get the job done, truth to be told, I like the Intel Data Migration better. It has a couple more features  such as creating a bootable media rescue disk and a drive cleaner tool. Although “secure erased” would be as efficient.

Missing from the Magician 4. 8:

• “Performance Optimization”, “OS optimization” and “Rapid Mode” would probably become available in the next Magician update.
• AES 256-bit FDE with eDrive and TCG Opal are not supported until a new firmware update within the release date.

Testing Protocol

I went through most of the popular benchmark tools, AS SSD, CrystalDiskMark, ATTO, IoMeter, Anvil’s Storage Utility v1.1.0 and PCMark Vantage. But I also used performance monitoring tools such as DiskMon and hIOmon, primarily to validate the tests.

Instead of posting chart after chart, I believe, as a consumer, what is important is how the product fits the needs and not chasing after uber high numbers which are only attainable during benchmarking. For this review, I narrowed it down to Anvil’s Storage Utility, PC Mark Vantage Licensed Pro version, CrystalMark and PCMark8.

Drive conditioning: The SSDs were prepped with Windows 7 (from an image), filled with about 120GB of data total and benchmarks were run from the tested unit acting as the OS drive.

Steady state: This state occurred over time when the drive went through enough write cycles, or to be more specific program/erase (P/E) cycles, that write performances were consistent or stable. It may take a few weeks before the SSD reaches it, depending on the computing usage, but it can be accelerated using IoMeter.

In summary, Steady State is: Written Data = User capacity x 2, at least.

What numbers are relevant in a real world usage?

Keep in mind that unlike synthetic benchmarks which perform only one specific operation at the time for a predetermined duration, seq read, then seq write then random read, and so on and so forth, real world usage paints a different picture.

All four access types can occur at any time, and different transfer rates and different (I/O access) percentages. For instance, a storage subsystem on a streaming server would mostly see high seq read I/O, large block reads, with very little to none write.

Looking at a database server without blob data type, we would probably see 75% random read, 20% random write and 5% random and seq write. I could either guesstimate the different ratios or figure a method to define a more accurate I/O usage baseline.

I/O Baseline

While it is entertaining to run a bunch of benchmarking tools, expecting huge numbers, the purpose of testing the units is to get a good look at how they perform under realistic desktop usage pattern. That is why I picked PCMark Vantage suite as my usage pattern. By capturing and analyzing I/O during the PCVM run, disk operations are breakdown to percentage read vs. write, random vs. sequential, queue depth and average file transfer size.

With that information, benchmarking makes more sense since all the numbers do not carry the same importance, thus some results are more valuable than others.

In summary, I/O pattern defines what I need from the device vs. what can the device do overall.

The I/O baseline process was explained in the Intel 525 mSATA review.

From the numbers, I rated the I/O usage by activity as follow: Random Read > Random Write > Seq Read > Seq Write and average file size is 128K.

To cover Queue Depth, I used hIOmon during the PC Vantage full run. There is a trial version for a week, which is enough time to build the baseline. Based on the chart below, it is obvious that a benchmark score from a QD 16 (or more) does not carry the same weight as a score from a QD 1.

About 95%+ of the reads/writes I/O are at or under Queue Depth 4. Although the bulk of it is at Queue Depth 2 or under.

Performance

Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to review any other NVMe PCIe SSD prior to the 950 PRO. It is also unfair to compare SATA 3 SSD to high-performance NVMe PCIe SSD unit, but the reality is that many of you will upgrade from SATA 3.

Look at this from a potential upgrade perspective: would a 950 PRO NVMe PCIe SSD improve my system performance?

High QD and sequential I/O take the most advantage of the PCIe x4 bandwidth! If you are running heavy I/O applications, 950 PRO is a must!

PCMark Vantage showed a significant improvement with the “HDD” and the “Productivity” test.

«THOSE ARE AMAZING NUMBERS»

950 PRO on an “older” motherboard.

Out of curiosity, I managed to perform a CrystalDiskMark test on the 950 PRO with a  Z77 motherboard and Windows 7 PRO.

To get the 950 PRO (with a M.2 adapter) recognized in Windows 7 on a Z77 motherboard was a bit tricky. The system already had a bootable Windows 7 PRO drive. The good news was the 950 PRO was detected in the BIOS. Once the O.S. loaded, the 950 drive was not detected. The hardware was showing with an exclamation point in device manager.

I installed the Samsung NVMe driver, only then, the drive was detected. Next, the drive was cloned with “Data Migration”. That allowed the 950 PRO to boot up on a Z77 motherboard.

While there is a performance improvement using an M.2 apdater and the 950PRO the ratio perf/$ may not be favorable.

Conclusion

Will it replace the Samsung SSD 850 series? I think not. The SATA 3, especially the 850 EVO version is still “the best bang for the buck”.

Should you get it? It comes down to your computing usage and your workstation setup.

For a basic home computing usage, which revolves around internet browsing, casual gaming and media streaming, there is really no benefit to make the jump.

«THE MOST COMPETITIVE NVME PCIE SSD «Assuming I am considering the 950 PRO, because I am looking into get a new PC setup, hopefully based on Skylake and the Z170 chipset. In that scenario it will definitely make sense to go with the 950 PRO to take advantage of the native M. 2 NVMe motherboard support.

Assuming that you are a power user working with heavy imaging, sounds, 3D rendering applications and/or virtualization then the 950 PRO would be very appealing because of its high sequential I/O performance.

Gaming experience could be improved if the maps are big enough to make it worthwhile. This is the case for many top games these days.

Taking into account that street price tends to be lower than the MSRP, from a price/size/performance/warranty perspective, the 950 PRO is the most competitive NVMe PCIe SSD  on the market at this time.

Filed in Computers >Featured >Reviews. Read more about Samsung, Ssd and Storage.

Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 NVM Express SSD Review

Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 NVM Express SSD Review

Samsung 960 Pro 2TiB Review

A review of the 2048GB Samsung 960 Pro M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD Using Testbed v1.0 and Methodology v1.0.

Released in the second half of 2016, the Samsung 960 Pro was Samsung’s 2nd Generation high-end retail NVMe SSD. It followed in the footsteps of the 950 Pro and OEM-only XP941 as the fastest drives which consumers could get their hands on during the infancy of consumer PCIe SSDs.

The 960 Pro improved upon the 950 Pro by upgrading the previous UBX controller with a new controller called Polaris – not to be confused with the codename of the AMD RX 400-series GPUs released the same year. This started a trend that persists to this day where Samsung gives a consumer friendly name to their SSD controllers rather than just a 3-character designation. Additionally, the 960 Pro series upgrades the 3D V-NAND from 32-layer 128Gb MLC to 48-layer 256Gb MLC.

Although the 960 series hasn’t been the latest and greatest for a number of years it represents the only truly high-end SSD I currently possess. When I purchased it in early 2017, it was one of the only consumer SSDs, M.2 or otherwise, that reached the 2TB capacity I needed, and I paid full retail price for it – $1300. This was the first NVMe drive I’d ever purchased as, at the time, SATA drives were considerably less expensive in terms of $/GB and in most cases I needed capacity over absolute speed. For this reason I was both thrilled yet disappointed when I started using the drive. For a few scenarios it was drastically faster than the SATA drive it replaced, but in many others the improvements underwhelmed.

My biggest letdown with the drive was actually its on-disk copy performance. At the time I wasn’t very familiar with what to expect of PCIe/NVMe SSDs and was expecting that because read speeds were in excess of 3GB/s and write speeds were right around 2GB/s that copy performance would be in the 1GB/s or higher range. This didn’t end up being the case. So while on-disk copies were significantly faster than on SATA drives, they weren’t what I’d been hoping for.

It was this varied real-world performance that made me really excited to put this drive on my testbed and run some measurements on it to see how it fared against other NVMe drives.

Before I get too far, if you want to know more about how I perform the tests in this review, check out my first blog post: SSD Review Background, Setup, and Methodology v1.0. My first round of reviews will all use the same Testbed and Methodology, so will be directly comparable.

The Drive:

Samsung 960 Pro 2048GB

Samsung uses their in-house Polaris controller paired with a full 2GB DRAM cache and 2TiB of 3D V-NAND all mounted to a sylish black PCB.

The Drive — Table of Specifications
	Samsung 960 Pro
M.2 Dimensions	2280
Capacity	2048GB
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x4
NVMe Protocol	1.2
Seq Read	3500 MB/s
Seq Write	2100 MB/s
I/O Read	440K (4KB @ QD32 with 4T)
I/O Write	360K (4KB @ QD32 with 4T)
Active Power	5.8W
Idle Power	40mW
DevSleep Idle	8mW (L1. 2)
Components	Samsung Phoenix Controller + 2GB DRAM Cache + 4 NAND Packages
NAND	Samsung 48-layer 256Gb 3D V-NAND MLC
Rated Endurance	1200TBW
Retail/OEM Drive	Retail
Cost New	$1299
Cost Today	~$450 on eBay

The 3500MB/s sequential read speed was already running into the limits of the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, but the peak 2100MB/s still had room to grow in subsequent generations.

Review

For this review I’ll be comparing the 2TiB Samsung 960 Pro to the 1TiB Toshiba XG6, 1TB WD SN550, and 1TB Samsung 860 EVO. The XG6 represents a relatively high performance PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD, the SN550 represents a several year newer but more mainstream competitor, and the 860 EVO represents high performance SATA SSDs. I’m ommitting the lower end NVMe drives for this review, but if you’d like to compare the results to other drives I’ve tested, the numbers in this review are directly comparable to any of my other reviews with the “Methodology-v1” and “Testbed-v1” tags.

In case you didn’t catch my note at the top, if you’d like to know more about my hardware setup as well as my testing methodology, check out my SSD Review Background, Setup, and Methodology v1.0 piece.

Write Test — Disk Fill Summary

The 960 Pro’s write performance leads this pack of drives by a healthy margin, measuring 1848MB/s average over the whole drive. This is about twice what the entry-level NVMe SN550 delivers and nearly 4x what the SATA 860 EVO musters.

These write speeds translate into quite impressive disk-fill times when considering the 2TiB capacity of the drive. It takes nearly the same amount of time to fill the SN550 and almost double to fill the 860 EVO, despite both drives having half the capacity of the 960 Pro. If you’ve got lots of large data files to move, the 960 Pro is a great contender.

Write Test — Disk Fill

Samsung 960 Pro 2048GB

The 960 Pro’s write performance peaks at just over 2000MB/s. This matches the specs provided by Samsung within a reasonable margin of error so it isn’t a disappointment in that regard, but in 2021 this isn’t all that impressive for peak write performance. PCIe 3.0 drives have been shown to deliver more than 50% better peak write speeds and PCIe 4.0 drives extend that lead to more than double.

That said, due in part to using MLC NAND instead of TLC NAND, the 960 Pro’s sustained write performance only takes a small hit compared to its peak performance, delivering a very steady 1840MB/s from around 7% full all the way to 100% full. Modern drives don’t manage to keep up once their SLC caches are exhausted. One notable exception would be the 970 Pro (also an MLC-based drive) which looks to sustain in the neighborhood of 2800MB/s based on other reviews around the web, but other PCIe 3. 0 and even PCIe 4.0 drives seem to regress to below 2000MB/s for sustained writes once their SLC caches are filled.

AS-SSD Sequential Tests

For 1GB sequential reads and writes, the 960 Pro is roughly on-par with the XG6, which isn’t a bad thing. Notably, the XG6 delivers higher write speeds for smaller sequential writes like this test due to having higher peak write speeds to its SLC cache, though the lead over the 960 Pro isn’t very large.

The 960 Pro outperforms the SN550 by around 18% for reads and 12% for writes. SATA drives are in a completely different (lower) league compared to these high performance NVMe drives.

AS-SSD 4K Tests

Similar to the AS SSD Sequential test above, the 960 Pro’s performance is very similar to that of the XG6. Here, there isn’t much separation between the drives, even the SATA 860 EVO, though DRAMless, QLC, and otherwise low-end NVMe and SATA drives will suffer somewhat in this test as will older SSDs.

PCMark 8 Storage Test

As with most of the other tests thus far, in the PCMark 8 Storage Test the 960 Pro mostly matches the newer XG6. Despite delivering about 20% higher performance than the SN550, you’d likely be hard-pressed to tell the difference between those two drives head-to-head in most consumer workloads as the differences in measured times for the various sub-tests are mostly fractions of a second.

Large-File Transfer Tests

In case the disk-to-disk transfer, if numbers look a bit odd for the faster NVMe drives, recall that this test is a mostly sequential 30GB transfer from a read-source that peaks at 750MB/s. Unlike the 128GB drives that mostly don’t even peak at (let alone sustain) over 750MB/s, the faster drives are severely bottlenecked during the copy portion of this test as they can write at significantly greater than 750MB/s. This testing bottleneck will be remedied on my next-generation testbed.

With that disclaimer out of the way, we see the 960 Pro running up against the same ~630MB/s barrier that the other high performing NVMe drives hit on this test rig. As expected for a high-performance NVMe drive, on-disk copy operations for large files are faster on the 960 Pro on this testbed. What’s interesting here is that the 960 Pro underperforms the XG6 by a healthy 11% margin. This characteristic is what lead me to develop my large-file copy test and was the reason why I felt the 960 Pro underperformed my expectations in my own personal use of the drive.

Regardless of the disappointments of my past self, the 960 Pro and the other NVMe drives in this roundup deliver several times the on-disk copy performance of the best SATA drives.

Small-File Transfer Tests

For the small-file tests the results are more of the same. Disk-to-disk performance of all three NVMe drives is similar, again somewhat capped by the bottlenecked source drive. On-disk copies actually place the 960 Pro last of the three NVMe drives in this test by a small margin, though in this metric the reason behind this loss has shifted to the other drives peak SLC write speeds – since this test is small enough to mostly or completely fit within their fast SLC caches.

Conclusion

What this review is really intended to do is provide a set of datapoints for how an older high-end drive performed and to help me better characterize the performance of a drive I spent many hours (sometimes impatiently) using.

Of the SSDs I had on-hand when I began testing drives, the Samsung 960 Pro was the one I was most excited to test due to its high-end nature and my personal experience with the drive. The drive is nowhere near cutting edge at the time of this writing. It is one of the older NVMe drive models I’ve tested, if not the oldest. Although it did tend to perform better than the newer but more down-market models, I somehow expected more from the former flagship. I guess this is just a case where reality didn’t meet my expectations.

That’s not to say that the 960 Pro is lackluster. Particularly when it launched it was well ahead of its competition. It’s just that in the intervening 4 years the competition has caught up – at least to the high bar the 960 Pro set when it was released. Unfortunately I don’t have any of its contemporaries to compare it to – at least partly because most of those were pretty mediocre next to the 960 Pro, didn’t offer the 2TB capacity which I needed at the time, and (at least based on my analysis at the time) weren’t worth the price premium over competing SATA SSDs.

Today, high capacity drives remain somewhat rare and premium. There are certainly more drive models that match or exceed the 2TiB/2TB capacity, but there are still plenty of models that top out at a more consumer-friendly 1TB. Thankfully the price premium for 2TB/2TiB drives is certainly lower than the shocking $1300 the 2TiB 960 Pro originally sold for, though a lot of this is just the steady decrease in NAND prices over time. NAND density improvements over the years have shifted the peak capacity options for consumer SSDs to 4TB or 8TB.

One area where more modern drives may start to trail the 960 Pro is in write endurance. In theory the TLC-based 970 EVO Plus 2TB matches the 1200TBW rating of the 960 Pro, but in practice the endurance of MLC should far exceed even the best TLC. That said, 1200TBW is a LOT of writes for a consumer machine (as opposed to a server that faces 24/7 load). Even my 960 Pro which I used pretty heavily for several years for virtualization work only has about 50TB of writes on it – a mere 4% of its rated endurance. In most cases, most drives will have far more endurance than the average consumer will ever need. The drive will either be outdated or fail for other reasons before the NAND endurance is exhausted. The up and coming exception to this notion is QLC drives, though at least in larger capacities endurance still shouldn’t be as big of a worry as many enthusiasts make it out to be.

But none of this is buying advice. In 2021, the 960 Pro is probably a silly SSD to buy. Even compared to a used 960 Pro there are less expensive drives in the 2TB-size-class. Unless you’re getting an extremely good deal on a drive you know hasn’t had its NAND exhausted by having lived its life inside a write-heavy server there are going to be better options available.

Nostalgia and curiosity were the main driving forces behind me writing this review, and now both feelings have been satiated. At least, unlike so many things in the computer industry, the 960 Pro seems to have aged with grace.

Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.

2 NVMe SSD

Samsung’s latest flagship 950 Pro M.2 SSD utilizes four PCI-E 3.0 lanes and features the Samsung UBX controller, 3D V-NAND, and support for the new NVMe standard.

March 11, 2016 by Lawrence Lee

For the past few years, the M.2 SSD form factor has seen increasing support from notebook and motherboard manufacturers. Like the mSATA models they replace, M.2 drives are considerably smaller than traditional 2.5-inch drives and they are connected via a PCI Express interface that allows them to surpass the bandwidth ceiling of SATA 6 Gbps, widely considered to be a bottleneck to high-end SSD performance. Given the ample number of PCI-E lanes provided by Intel’s latest generation of CPUs, most Skylake LGA1151 motherboards support M.2 drives that can tap into four PCI Express 3.0 lanes rather than two, alleviating the restriction to an even greater degree.

Six months ago, we examined the Kingston HyperX Predator, an M.2 drive with a Marvell controller, 1GB of DDR3 cache, top-notch 19 nm Toggle-Mode NAND flash memory, and a PCI-E 2.0 x4 adapter card for users of older systems lacking M.2 support. It displayed encouraging synthetic performance and took the top spot in our real world performance metrics, but it was only slightly faster than the previous champ, the Samsung 850 Pro, an old fashioned 2.5-inch SATA 6 Gbps model.

One note about the Predator is that it lacks support for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), a newer storage protocol standard developed specifically for PCI Express based drives. The ancient Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) standard is still widely used for SSDs today, despite the fact it was designed with mechanical hard drives in mind. The new standard takes better advantage of the nature of SSDs and their multiple internal memory channels, allowing for more/deeper command queues, improving support for multi-core processors, and lowering latency by more than half.

The new standard is supported by Samsung’s latest flagship SSD, the 950 Pro, which comes in capacities of 256GB and 512GB, packed in an M.2 2280 (22 mm wide, 80 mm long) form factor running on a PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface. It utilizes the same Samsung UBX controller that drives the SM951, a high-end M.2 drive offered only on the OEM market, sports V-NAND MLC chips made of transistors arranged both vertically and horizontally to increase density, and 512MB of DDR3 cache.

To use the 950 Pro, an M.2 slot connected via four PCI-E lanes (or via PCI-E x4 adapter card) is required to see its full benefits. Additionally, in order to boot from it, the PC must support UEFI and have an NVMe-compatible BIOS. Thus far, official support on the desktop is primarily limited to Intel Z97/Z170/X99 boards and the latest AMD 990FX models. Windows 7 users also need to pre-install a driver, and while Windows 8 and 10 have a native NVMe driver, it’s recommended to use Samsung’s driver for optimal results. This is not an SSD for older machines.

Samsung 950 Pro: Specifications (from the product data sheet)
Dimensions (LxWxH)	Max 80. 15 x Max 22.15 x Max 2.38 (mm)
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x4 (up to 32Gb/s) NVMe 1.1
Form Factor	M.2(2280)†
Controller	Samsung UBX controller
NAND Flash Memory	Samsung V-NAND
DRAM Cache Memory	512MB LPDDR3
Capacity	256GB	512GB
Sequential Read*	Up to 2,200 MB/s	Up to 2,5000 MB/s
Sequential Write*	Up to 900 MB/s	Up to 1,500 MB/s
4K Random Read (QD32 Thread 4)	Up to 270K IOPS	Up to 300K IOPS
4K Random Write (QD32 Thread 4)	Up to 85K IOPS	Up to 110K IOPS
4K Random Read (QD1 Thread 1)	Up to 11K IOPS	Up to 12K IOPS
4K Random Write (QD1 Thread 1)	Up to 43K IOPS	Up to 43K IOPS
TBW	200TB	400TB
Power Consumption** (active avg/max)	5. 1W/6.4W	5.7W/7.0W
Power Consumption** (idle)	70mW
Power Consumption (DEVSLP, L1.2 mode)	2.5mW
Data Security	AES 256-bit for User Data Encryption TCG Opal Family Spec and eDrive(IEEE1667) to be supported by FW update
Weight	Max. 10g (512GB)
Reliability	MTBF : 1.5 million hours
Supporting features	TRIM(Required OS support), Garbage Collection, S.M.A.R.T
Temperature	Operating Temp : 0°C to 70°C (Measured by SMART Temperature. Proper airflow recommended)
Humidity	5% to 95%, non-condensing
Vibration	Non-Operating: 20~2000Hz, 20G
Shock	Non-Operating: 1500G , duration 0. 5m sec, 3 axis
Warranty	5 years limited
* Sequential performance measurements based on Crystal Disk Mark 5.0.2 and Random performance measurements based on Iometer 1.1.0. Performance may vary based on SSD’s firmware version, system hardware & configuration. Test system configuration : Intel Core i5-6600K @ 3.5GHz, DDR3 1600MHz 8GB, OS – Windows10 x64, Mainboard: MSI (Skylake), Model : Z170 KRAIT Gaming**Power consumption measured with IOmeter 1.1.0 with Intel i7-4770K(Haswell, 3.5GHz), DDR3 8GB, ASRock Z87 Extreme9/ac, APST on, OS- Windows7 Ultimate x64 SP1 †M.2 is a specification of form factor for ultra-thin PCs, The M.2 standard allows widths 12, 16, 22 and 30mm and lengths of 16, 26, 30, 38, 42, 60, 80 and 110 mm, Commercially M.2 is popular with width 22mm and legths 30, 42, 60 , 80 and 110m

TESTING

Our samples were tested according to our standard
hard drive testing methodology. As of mid-2008, we have been conducting
most acoustics tests in our
own 10~11 dBA anechoic chamber, which results in more accurate, lower SPL
readings than before, especially with sub-20 dBA@1m devices.

Two forms of hard drive noise are measured:

1. Airborne acoustics
   
2. Vibration-induced noise.

These two types of noise impact the subjective
perception of hard drive noise differently depending on how and where the drive
is mounted.

Both forms of noise are evaluated objectively and
subjectively. Airborne acoustics are measured in our anechoic chamber using a lab reference
microphone and computer audio measurement system. Measurements are taken at a distance of one meter from the top
of the drive using an A-weighted filter. Vibration noise is rated on a scale
of 1-10 by comparing against our standard reference drives.

As of late-2011, we have been conducting performance testing. A combination of timed real-world tests is used to represent a workload of common activities for a boot drive including loading games, running disk-intensive applications, copying files, and installing programs.

Summary of primary HDD testing tools:

• HD Tune Pro
  – Benchmarking tool for storage devices and used to check/set Automatic Acoustic Management.
• CrystalDiskMark
  – Benchmarking tool for storage devices.
• SPCR’s Audio Audio
  Recording/Analysis system using SpectraPlus
  and other utilities
• SPCR Anechoic Chamber
• Custom-built HDD power
  measurement and Vibration test tools

Drive Test Platform:

• Intel Core i7-6700K
  processor – four cores. 4.0~4.2 GHz, 14 nm, 91W, Hyper-threading, integrated Intel HD 530 graphics, underclocked to 1.6 GHz
• Asus Maximus VIII Gene – Z170 chipset, microATX
• Noctua NH-L12 cooler – stock 120 mm fan only
• Kingston Fury memory – 2x8GB DDR4-2667, C15
• Kingston HyperX 3K solid-state drive – 120GB, 2. 5-inch, SATA 6 Gbps
• Seasonic
  SS-460FL power supply – 460W, ATX, fanless.
• Microsoft
  Windows 10 operating system – Professional, 64-bit

Real World Performance Test Tools:

• Call
  of Duty: World At War – PC game
• Civilization: Beyond Earth – PC game
• Adobe Photoshop CC – image manipulation software
• ExactFile –
  file integrity verification tool
• TrueCrypt 7.1a
  – file/disk encryption tool
• 3DMark 11 Installer
• Apache OpenOffice Installer

Real World Benchmark Details:

• Boot: Time elapsed between pressing the power button and Windows start sound playing (minus the time for an average SSD to get to the first load screen, about 12 seconds on our test system)
  .
• CIV: BE: Time elapsed between canceling the introduction scene and appearance of the opening menu.
• Photoshop: Time to load Photoshop CC.
• COD: WAW: Combined time to load the “Black Cats” and “Breaking Point” levels of Call of Duty: World At War
• ExactFile: Time to create a MD5 check file of our entire test suite folder.
• TrueCrypt: Time to creating a 10GB encrypted file container.
• 3DMark 11: Install time, longest interval between prompts.
• OpenOffice: Install time, longest interval between prompts.
• Small File Copy: Copy time for a variety of small HTML, JPEG, MP3, ZIP, and EXE files.
• Large File Copy: Copy time for 4 AVI files, 2 x 700MB and 2 x 1400MB
  in size.

A final caveat: As with most reviews, our comments
are relevant to the samples we tested. Your sample may not be identical. There
are always some sample variances, and manufacturers also make changes without
telling everyone.

Ambient conditions at time of testing were 10. 5 dBA and 20~23°C.

Test System Notes

For the past four years our storage test system consisted of a Intel Sandy Bridge processor paired with a P67 motherboard running Windows 7 and thus far the combination has worked fine for testing standard SATA 6 Gbps drives. We have now moved over to a Skylake platform for M.2 and NVMe support. We hope to use this system for several years, so the operating system has been updated to Windows 10 as Microsoft plans to drop full support for Windows 7/8 on Skylake PCs in July 2017, only offering the most critical security fixes thereafter.

Synthetic and power tests are run from a separate drive containing the operating system to take the overhead of Windows out of the equation. The boot drive is then imaged to the test drive for our real world benchmarks. In the case of the 950 Pro, we used Samsung’s Magician software for cloning and then installed their NVMe driver which purportedly offers improved performance over the native Microsoft driver.

Power Consumption

Note: For SATA drives, the power consumption is measured directly by tapping into the SATA power connector. For M.2 drives, the power consumption is estimated by comparing the system power consumption with that of previously tested SATA drives.

On our test motherboard, the Samsung 950 Pro and the last M.2 drive we tested, the HyperX Predator, both consume substantially more power than traditional SATA SSDs. A typical 2.5-inch model sucks down 0.5~0.6 W at idle and about 1.6W when seeking. The 950 Pro’s idle consumption is more than four times that while its seek consumption is almost twice as high. Its likely that notebooks have superior PCI-E power management such that battery life is not adversely affected.

Synthetic Performance

We start off with synthetic tests results. They don’t tell the whole story of course, but it’s a quick and dirty way of gauging relative performance, and of course, it’s easily reproducible by our readers at home.

HD Tune

HD Tune’s main sequential transfer benchmark shows superb, albeit varied, performance across the drive. The first half of the drive is noticeably faster, but even the minimum read/write speeds are higher than most drives’ maximum read/write. The overall transfer rate is about double that of the best SATA 6 Gbps models. Access times are also insanely low at less than 0.03 ms. Transferring large amounts of data should be a breeze for the 950 Pro.

CrystalDiskMark

The drive’s performance in CrystalDiskMark is the highest we’ve seen, coming close to 2000 MB/s in sequential 512K writes. Random performance with smaller block sizes is more relevant to real world performance and the 950 Pro excels in that department as well. All the 4K numbers are substantially higher than previously tested drives.

Real World Performance

At this time, only a handful of comparison drives have been re-tested on our new platform:

• Kingston HyperX Predator 480GB, a competing M.2 drive that uses the older AHCI protocol equipped with a Marvell 88SS9293 controller and 1GB of cache
• Kingston HyperX Savage 480GB, a modern mid-range SATA 6 Gbps drive equipped with a Phison S10 controller
• ADATA XPG SX910 128GB, an older SATA 6 Gbps drive powered by the once ubiquitous SandForce SF-2811 controller
• Seagate Enterprise 3.5 HDD v6 6TB, a fast Enterprise-class 7200 RPM mechanical hard drive

The 950 Pro doesn’t get off to a great start with a very poor boot time for a SSD, taking almost twice as long as the SX910 o get into Windows 10. There’s a noticeable delay after the initial POST screen as it pauses for several seconds while displaying a flashing underscore before launching Windows, suggesting that it’s a drive initialization problem. We were unable to successfully troubleshoot this issue despite updating the BIOS and trying various settings including enabling CSM (Compatibility Support Module). It does manage to load Civilization: Beyond Earth faster than the rest of the field but there’s a lot of ground to make up.

The 950 Pro does redeem itself in our second set of tests, starting up Photoshop in under 11 seconds, and running neck and neck with the Predator.

Another win is earned in our application tests with the 950 Pro staying barely ahead of the Predator.

The 950 Pro smokes the competition when it comes to copying files to itself, shaving off about three seconds off the Predator’s results and less than half the time of other two SSDs.

Installation performance is about the same between the drives with the 950 Pro and Predator slightly ahead of the pack.

To get a sense of the relative overall performance of the drives, each drive has been assigned a proportional score in each real world benchmark with each test counting for a 1/10 of the final score. The scale has been adjusted with the ADATA SX910 as the reference point with 100 points.

According to this metric, the 950 Pro posts a 12 point lead over the Predator equivalent to about 9%, and demolishes the rest of the field, beating the Savage by a considerable 30% and the SX910 by a massive 42%, though it should be noted that the 950 Pro is noticeably faster these SATA-based drives in only three of our ten tests.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Over the past few years, the pricing of solid-state drives has improved considerably, but real world performance seen some stagnation. The latest and greatest drives have often been only incremental improvements over their predecessors. It has been believed for some time that the SATA 6 Gbps interface was holding back potential SSD performance, prompting the influx of new storage interfaces like SATA Express and M.2. NVMe is the next step in advancing consumer SSDs, though it’s still unclear how much of a difference it truly makes in actual use.

At the time of each drive’s testing, the past three of Samsung flagships, the 830, 840 Pro, and 850 Pro, have taken our performance crown, and the 950 Pro follows in their footsteps. Other than an unusually slow boot time, it’s faster across the board than the HyperX Predator, beating it in 8 of our 10 real world benchmarks, though not by huge margins. Samsung’s controller and its V-NAND Flash chips along with the wider PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface could easily account for this improvement alone. Either way, both drives are a step ahead of the SATA 6 Gbps competition, though in everyday usage, the main difference is in file transfer speeds.

The 950 Pro 512GB is currently selling for approximately US$325 which is actually less than the Predator 480GB. However, it’s still a hefty amount compared to the various SATA 6 Gbps options on the market. At the ~500GB capacity level, you can get a very decent drive for one-third to one-half the price that can keep up with the 950 Pro in most situations. The 950 Pro doesn’t come close to delivering two to three times the performance, so it’s not buy from a value perspective (the 256GB model somewhat more competitive in this regard). The price for cutting edge performance is always steep. If budget is not an issue and you have or are planning to build a new high-end PC, the 950 Pro has to be a top contender.

Our thanks to Samsung for the 950 Pro 512GB solid-state drive sample.

The Samsung 950 Pro 512GB is recommended by SPCR

* * *

SPCR Articles of Related Interest:
WD Black 6TB Performance Hard Drive
WD Blue SSHD 4TB & 1TB Hybrid Drives
Kingston HyperX Predator 480GB M. 2/PCI-E SSD
Kingston HyperX Savage 480GB SSD
Crucial MX100 512GB & Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSDs
Seagate Enterprise Class v4 6TB Hard Drive

* * *

Discuss
this article in the SPCR Forums

Review of SSD Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW or NVMe new at SATA price 128-layer 3D V-NAND TLC memory. But the main distinguishing feature is the lack of a DRAM cache, which was not previously on Samsung NVMe drives. Thanks to this, it was possible to reduce the price of SSDs and now Samsung 9 drives80 are the same as SATA SSD Samsung 870 EVO. The novelty makes it clear that now it’s time for NVMe SSD and if you have an M.2 connector, then you need to use it, instead of using a SATA SSD. Let’s find out what the smallest drive in the 980 series is capable of — SSD Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW.

Where to buy?
Video review
Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW SSD review
Features
Packing and contents
Exterior
What’s inside
Tests
Results

Where to buy?

I bought a Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW SSD here. Choose, compare and buy SSD storage https://ya.cc/SQbnFtel at the best prices.

Video review

On my YouTube channel, you can always watch video reviews of various SSDs and other electronic equipment.

Review SSD Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW

Characteristics

Available volume: 250 , 500, 1 TB 9000 to 1300 MB/sec
Interface: NVME PCIe 3.0
Memory Type: TLC 3D V-NAND
Controller: Samsung Pablo (S4LR033 SCBCUMD A2039 ARM) 9000 Buer: No, HMB (Host MMRY NOT, is used. buffer)
,000 TB

Packaging and contents

The packaging of the Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW SSD does not differ from the boxes of other SSDs of this brand. Except that since the 980 PRO and 980 series, the packaging has become a vertical format.

On the back of everything there is also a sticker with a description in Russian.

Everything is also protected from opening the SSD box by two stickers: one with the volume on top, and the other with the model on the bottom.

The bottom sticker also contains important information about the model, volume, country of production (in my case, Korea), serial number and production date (February 14, 2021).

Inside the box we find a Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW SSD in a quality blister and a small instruction book with an insert that tells us to download Samsugn Magician proprietary software.

Some of the most important information in this manual is in the Turkish section. Here are resources for all current Samsung drives. In Russian, there is a place to fill in information about the SSD and the seller’s seal (which usually no one puts). Also, the warranty for our SSD drive is 5 years. If you read everything, you can understand the encoding of Samsung serial numbers.

Appearance

All elements of the Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW SSD are located on the front side, but traditionally covered with a branded sticker. It has no information about the loss of warranty in case of peeling off, but has special cuts in the corners that will damage the sticker when peeled off. Strange decision. The sticker also contains all the information about the drive: name, volume, batch number, model, serial number and production date (February 2021).

There is also a sticker on the back with only certification badges. But under the sticker is a copper plate that distributes heat from the memory chip to the SSD textolite board. Also, right on the board there is a spectacular inscription SAMSUNG SSD, it’s a pity no one will see it after installing the drive.

What’s inside

If you peel off the sticker starting from the middle, then it simply comes off. And before us appears a rather meager set of elements — a controller, a memory chip and small elements. Because Samsung SSD 9 series80 bufferless (DRAM-less), then there is no question of any DRAM memory chip. It was the absence of this chip that made it possible to make a new NVMe SSD at the price of SATA.

The main element is of course the new controller — Samsung Pablo (S4LR033 SCBCUMD A2039 ARM).

The next important item is Samsung’s new 128-layer 3D V-NAND TLC memory — SEC 104 K9CMGY8 J5BCCKO

Benchmarks Samsung SSD 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW

Benchmark: 0003 Chassis — Thermaltake Core P3 TG Black

The Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW is installed in the topmost M.2 slot on the motherboard. It is there that the drive runs along the PCIe lines from the processor. After installing and loading the OS, our SSD does not appear in the system in any way. To do this, you need to initialize it through Disk Management and format it. I always partition drives to GPT and format drives to NTFS. After formatting, we get the available volume of 232.87 GB.

Next, we run the CrystalDiskInfo utility to determine if any manipulations were made with the SSD after production. 0 GB written and read, 0 hours total operation time and only 2 power-ups — we have a brand new Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW SSD.

Next, we run the test with the CrystalDiskMark utility in order to compare the obtained speeds with those declared by the manufacturer. As a result, we got excellent results: 2923 MB / s for reading (declared up to 2900 MB/s) and 1409 MB/s per write (claimed up to 1300 MB/s). An excellent result, characteristic of Samsung drives. It is also worth noting the result of random reading of 4K blocks — 65.97 MB / s and this is an excellent result for a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD.

Next, using the AS SSD Benchmark utility, we look at how many points the drive will receive — 2913. And this is a good indicator for an inexpensive bufferless SSD drive. The remaining speeds are always lower than in CrystalDiskMark, this is the norm and we do not pay attention to them.

Next, use the ATTO Disk Benchmark utility to run the drive and look at the speed. The drive shows good results. Reading speed jumps a little, but this is not throttling, because. the speed did not drop sharply.

Using the AJA VIDEO SYSTEMS utility, we run a speed test and get the result of the drive when working with video files. This is approximately the real, maximum write speed to the drive.

Using the Samsung Magician proprietary utility, we perform a performance test and get 2945 MB/s read and 1247 MB/s write. With drive performance of 234130 IOPS for reading and 221679 IOPS for writing.

Next, we execute the TRIM command on our SSD and let it rest for 15 minutes so that the SLC cache is freed. After that, we proceed to tests for real write speed.

The test for the actual recording speed is carried out by copying a 100 GB folder to the Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW SSD (the folder contains large video files of 1-3 GB).

The average SSD write speed is 1.2 GB/s, which is an excellent result for an unbuffered SSD with a claimed speed of 1300 MB/s. But after writing 48 GB, the speed drops to 195 MB / s, which is predictable and normal for bufferless SSDs.

When recording the second 100 GB folder, the speed is stable around 195-200 MB / s, because. SLC cache is full.

Next, execute the TRIM command again and let it rest for 15 minutes to copy the data to the SSD again and find out how much the buffer (SLC cache) has decreased after filling up by 200 GB. I copy data with a volume of 25.9GB and as a result of the recording I get — the buffer size fell to 7.7 GB, because. here is a dynamic SLC cache.

This is followed by the TRIM command again and a pause of 15 minutes for tests by the AIDA64 utility. The linear recording test graph confirms our real recording test results.

After all the tests, the Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW SSD reached 65 degrees, which is not much for an NVMe SSD. But this is not the maximum temperature of this SSD, we will check the maximum.

And now you can see how many gigabytes of resource my various tests take.

Next, I decided to check the maximum temperature of the drive, which will be shown in the utilities and the maximum temperature of the controller using a thermal imager, and the results surprised me. I moved the Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW SSD drive to the lowest M.2 slot on the motherboard — this way the drive will work in PCIe mode along the chipset lines. And at the same time I did a CrystalDiskMark test to compare speeds in different slots and the result was lower than when the SSD was connected via PCIe lines from the processor.

The drive was heated during repeated linear read and write tests using the CrystalDiskMark utility with 8 GB files and 9 repetitions per cycle.

In this way, we managed to warm up the drive to a maximum of 81 degrees, as it turned out, this is the temperature of the memory chip.

But the maximum temperature on the chip was 115 degrees. And decide for yourself if it’s hot or not.

For some, these results will be shocking. But! This is one of the first SSDs I measured. Therefore, until there is a sufficiently large database of such snapshots, this SSD should not be considered hot. Moreover, no one will rape the drive in such a way as a. With simple use, you will not see such temperatures. From here we get that the SSD sensor shows the temperature of the SSD on the memory chip, and not the controller.

this thermal imager was given to me for a while, I collect donations to buy a thermal imager for myself for constant tests in my reviews and videos. I am looking at the thermal imager for smartphone and tablet SEEK THERMAL COMPACT PRO .
At the time of the release of the review, 10,577.13 ₽ have been collected

DonationAlerts — https://www.donationalerts.com/r/prossd
YandexMoney (Y. money) — 41001863260576 9003 VK0 90 — https://www.donationalerts.com/r/prossd
/vk.me/moneysend/davilkin

Results

SSD Samsung 980 250GB MZ-V8V250BW turned out to be a very interesting SSD. Firstly, according to the results of the tests: the actual speeds in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark are higher than stated by the manufacturer, high real speed before the dynamic SLC cache overflows, and of course the temperature on the controller during continuous tests. Secondly, the price of this SSD is equal to the price of the SATA SSD Samsung 870 EVO, which is also pleasing.

The Samsung 980 is a great alternative to a SATA SSD, especially when building a new PC with an M.2 connector. And the high quality and reliability of SSD is time-tested. it remains to be seen how this new series 9 will show itself over time80.

Despite the high temperatures on the controller, I still recommend this SSD for purchase. It’s not expensive and it’s Samsung, which is synonymous with quality in the SSD industry. And the actual speeds of the drive speak for themselves.

Review and test Samsung SSD 980 1TB (MZ-V8V1T0BW)

Introduction and overview

I briefly got my hands on a 1TB Samsung SSD 980 worth about $140, as you might guess, I decided to do a short review and test of this drive.

Of course, there will be people who will object that ~$140 for a 1 TB SSD is expensive and can generally be bought cheaper, and I will not argue with this, but I will note that NAND memory subject to wear is installed in the SSD.

recommendations

And wear is an extremely unpleasant phenomenon that manufacturers only exacerbate for the sake of reducing the cost of production and stimulating buyers to throw in the trash already «worked out», the old one 9The 70 PRO has only 2% resource utilization at 30TB of writes, while the newer Kingston OEM with a miserable 12TB has already lost 8% of the resource:

Actually, I mean that the overpayment was for the sake of reliability, because Samsung SSDs fail quite rarely, as practice shows.

It’s a pity that hard drives don’t have a separate read/write volume counter, it would be interesting to see how much my old HDD has already experienced during its 54 thousand hours of operation…

Let’s get back to the object of review.

The box proudly indicated speeds of 3500 MB / s, though it says «up to» in very small print, which means that if this SSD can only 56 KB / s, it’s to 3500 MB / s , so no cheating.

The box is typical for a Samsung SSD, nothing special.

Everything is exactly as it was in 970 PRO, the same packaging template, I can’t say anything bad, but also good, the Chinese KingSpec had a simpler box, but the SSD was attached more securely than in Samsung’s packaging, but these are all trifles for once.

It’s not entirely clear to me what they are asking for ~$140, a piece of textolite, a controller and one NAND chip with a small number of SMD elements . ..

Although there is also an adhesive pad with a copper layer, it probably cost $ 100, but I doubt its value, especially considering the «quality of installation» from the factory.

Particularly annoying is the seal sticker that Samsung sealed in this way? Was it created so that no one would read the chip markings? Or maybe no one understands? What to disassemble actually in this piece of textolite with two soldered microcircuits that is not protected in any way?

So many questions, but so few answers, for this «seal» I’m ready to give Samsung a fat minus, because if I tried to remove it, it would definitely be damaged, which in my case is unacceptable.

The instruction is sealed with a strong plastic seal, of course I removed the seal, but the knife was not without a problem in any case.

Trying to find the technical specifications in the instructions, I got the impression that the instructions were formed on the «fuck off», everything is scattered anywhere and it’s hard to find the information of interest.

And in case of real problems, the guarantee will most likely be useless, there will not even be a place for it in the toilet, because the paper is too small and hard.

Testing

First of all, I conducted a short test with the address space in the BIOS, only the controller heated up perceptibly.

Next, I moved on to testing in the Windows environment, unfortunately Windows 10 turned out to be incapacitated because during installation it managed to put it mildly «lose» its bootloader on another drive.

Therefore, the tests will only be from under Windows 7, since, unlike Windows 10, it did not «lose» anything during installation on the SATA SSD allocated for it, fiddling with installing Windows 10, I have neither the time nor the desire, in any In this case, the storage subsystem did not change much between systems of the Vista family, on which even Windows 11 is based.

It looks like Samsung should have glued the copper pad on the chips, and the “seal” on the textolite, probably the “specialists” working at Samsung are not aware that BGA soldering is not capable of removing a large amount of heat from microcircuits and the heat-conducting pad turned out to be inappropriate on the textolite. ..

To test linear read speed I used ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01.0f1.

I have already used CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4 to evaluate random access speed.

The larger the volume of the test zone, the lower the final speeds, in the linear mode of operation this is not very noticeable, but with random access to information, the speed drop is multiple.

The maximum read speed was achieved with a block size of 512 KB and a queue depth of 8, it turned out to be 3.36 GB / s, almost the declared up to 3500 MB / s (3.42 GB / s).

In terms of write speeds, SSD behaves more modestly, 2.81 GB / s, but already achieved with a block size of 256 KB and a queue of 8.

When the queue decreases and the volume within which the work occurs, the speed naturally falls down.

In the random access mode, the influence of the volume within which the work takes place is especially noticeable, if the work is within 1 GB, then the speed with random access with a block size of 4 KB could reach 754 MB / s with a successful combination of circumstances with the queue size and the number of threads.

Another thing is when the work is done on a volume of 64 GB, then the read speed did not exceed 302 MB / s, and the write speed equaled to 173 MB / s, regardless of the number of threads and queue size.

Conclusion

Samsung SSD 980 showed quite good performance, but the shortcomings of NAND memory did not disappear, the speed drops when working with large volumes, and this is especially noticeable with random access within 64 GB.

It can be assumed that when running in random access across the entire volume of a 1 TB SSD, speeds can be below 100 MB / s, regardless of the number of threads and queues.

RAMD (RAM Drive) do not suffer from such shortcomings and provide maximum speed over the entire volume of the drive, but unfortunately the manufacturers have destroyed this NAND competitor.

The manufacturers probably didn’t like that RAM has no drawback in the form of wear and tear and at the same time provides maximum speeds absolutely always without the use of any «crutches», which put RAMD out of competition for working systems.

Especially how to force the consumer to buy a new drive if the old one will suit him in terms of volume and digest any possible intensity of work without wear and tear? And how can a limited warranty be applied if the drive will work without wear and tear?

If you think about it, the Gigabyte I-RAM created on the knee may well show higher speeds with random access in 1 thread 1 queue than the Samsung SSD 980 could do, but it’s not possible to check this in practice, since I don’t have a RAM drive at hand .

One way or another, RAM drives have long been buried by manufacturers, and Samsung SSD 980 is right here and now, only one thing is not clear, what they are asking for ~ $ 140, or even many times more expensive with a bare piece of textolite with a couple of microcircuits …

But manufacturers have already begun to actively use QLC NAND, while having only a few tens and hundreds of terabytes of resource for recording.

This prospect does not please me at all, especially considering that the duration of information storage in such drives is already becoming less than 1 year without recharge / rewriting, the technical process is no longer as fat as it was before, the microcircuits themselves are getting cheaper and cheaper for manufacturers, and the resource work of such microcircuits is less and less.

It seems that the era of disposable consumer goods is coming, well, or manufacturers will finally raise RAM drives by inflating inadequate costs when SSDs live on the strength of 10 TB of resource …

If earlier you could take any SSD and it was able to store information for years without recharge, the memory resource was hundreds of terabytes, now it’s worth choosing carefully what to buy for work.

That’s all, thank you for your attention.

This material was written by a site visitor and has been rewarded.

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