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Samsung SSD On a Tiny M.2 Stick Is Capable of Read Speeds Over 2GB/sec
MojoKid writes: Samsung has just announced its new SM951-NVMe SSD, the industry's first NVMe SSD to employ an M.2 form-factor. Samsung says the new gumstick style drive is capable of sequential read and write speeds of 2,260 MB/sec and 1,600 MB/sec respectively. Comparable SATA-based M.2 SSDs typically can only push read/write speeds of 540 MB/sec and 500 MB/sec, while most standard PCIe versions muster just north of 1GB/sec. The Samsung SM951-NVMe's performance is actually very comparable to the Intel SSD 750 Series PCIe x4 card but should help kick notebook performance up a notch in this common platform configuration.
This is faster by most measures than the top speed of the original DDR RAM standard.
Samsung's benchmarks apparently can't be trusted until you wait 60 days. 840 EVO performance tanks on data written a long time ago. And Samsung has been very slow to respond to these complaints. What's to say this one won't do the same? I would choose the Intel model to be safe.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Who do you think MAKES those M.2 SSDs in Apples? Hint: Samsung
So I can actually use M.2 drives like a flash drive? That would be awesome.
Does it throttle under heavy use? My concern is that it's rather small and without heat sinks...
Looking at the Wikipedia Article and the images for the different pinouts for the M.2 Specification, I have serious concerns about the ability to inadvertently flipping the cards, and inserting them upside down. Take a look at the B vs M configuration, which is exactly a mirror of each other.
UNLESS there is part of the spec that I am not seeing about another notching somewhere, the ability to flip these over and inserting them wrong is going to be a huge issue. And looking at all the examples on the page, I don't see anything to mitigate against inserting these upside down.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
my work computer could really go for one of these; this kind of performance is needed to be able to grind through all the corporate security software.
I suppose one could interpret a press release from January 7th as "Samsung has just announced its new", it was announced during CES on January 7th, here's the press release: http://www.samsung.com/global/... Linked article says model numbers haven't been released either.. here you go: 128GB NVME SSD SM951 - MZVPV128HDGL-00000 256GB NVME SSD SM951 - MZHPV256HDGL-00000 512GB NVME SSD SM951 - MZHPV512HDGL-00000 They've been shipping these in Lenovo and Apple laptops, they are scarce, but available (Amazon, RamCity, Ebay, Etc) at a little more than $1 per GB.
Well, nobody with a laptop is really going to notice much of a difference because frankly there isn't a whole lot of software that actually needs that kind of performance over the ~550 MBytes/sec that can already be obtained with SATA-III. Certainly not that would be run on a laptop anyway.
It's just using the PCI-e lanes on the M.2 connector instead of the SATA-III lanes. This isn't a magical technology. There's a loss of robustness and portability that gets traded off. It does point to SATA needing another few speed bumps, though. The fundamental serial link technology used at the physical level by PCI-e and SATA is almost identical. The main difference is that SATA is designed for cabling while M.2 is not (at least not M.2's PCI-e lanes).
-Matt
There are plenty of people working with 4K video nowadays. Even "just" HD video. A lot of folks move a LOT of data with "just their laptop". It's a trend. "Specialized workstations" we only know because we're here, but the truth is, most people just don't want a PC anymore.
Want a shocker? A LOT of people are just not replacing their broken PC anymore. They're happy with what their phone or tablet can do. And if they do get a PC, it's almost always a laptop.
Only gamers care for "big rigs" nowadays.
Indeed... my raw editing platform for HD video is a MBP -- and even with the new drives, the R/W is still the bottleneck (but just barely).
Any post production work goes onto beefier hardware, but for initial splicing and storyboarding of video, the MBP works quite well.
Gotta be Spiderdick.
Does whatever a Spiderdick does...
No it's not. Apple does not support NVME so there are no NVME drives in any Apple products.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The concept of a workstation has been pretty much marginalized due to things being "good enough". I might see one that is mainly to interact with a dedicated appliance (CNC mill), or perhaps a few workstations when working with definite tasks, but they tend to be bit players compared to desktops or laptops.
The desktop is becoming a role, as opposed to a device. For example, the Surface Pro when plugged into a dock functions as a desktop role. Same with most laptops.
As for laptops, they are nowhere near as expandable as a desktop... but they will do. A laptop with a decent SSD, 8-16 GB of RAM, and four cores can do OK at virtualization for small tasks.
OS X 10.10.3 added NVME support for the new MacBook retina.
SATA Express is the cabled equivalent of M.2, but it is limited to 2 PCIe lanes vs. the 4 possible with M.2.
I want a bootable PCIe 4.0 (or 3.0) x16 (or x8) card that gives me 4 (or 2) m.2 slots and a RAID controller.
Bonus points for passing through TRIM when possible (Intel does it with RAID 0 and RAID 1, I believe) and doing the OPAL/Bitlocker/whatever crypto passthrough so your OS can use the drive's built-in crypto instead of layering its own on top.
Alternatively, give me comparable NVMe SSDs with a PCIe connector instead of an m.2 connector, and give me a motherboard with a RAID controller connected to the PCIe bus, supporting all of the above (I'll use a PCIe riser if I have to).
Hell, I'd even settle for a bootable RAID controller behind 2 NVMe m.2 slots (PCIe 3.0 x4 or better for each) on the motherboard itself.
But as it is, these types of drives are notoriously difficult to buy because Samsung sells them to OEMs only and when you do get them (from RamCity) you're stuck with what your mobo gives you for the m.2 slot or you're stuck with some dodgy m.2 -> PCIe card that gives you 2 slots at PCIe 3.0 2x, or PCIe 3.0 4x with no boot support, and never any way to properly RAID the damned things.
That's a limitation of the Intel chipsets.
SATA Express lets you throw x lanes of PCIe y. That's the whole point of SATA Express instead of doing SATA 12 Gbps. SATA Express is scalable.
640k ought to be enough for anybody!
-Xoltri
...is capable of sequential read and write speeds of 2,260 MB/sec and 1,600 MB/sec respectively. Comparable SATA-based M.2 SSDs typically can only push read/write speeds of 540 MB/sec and 500 MB/sec,
Non-SATA M.2 drives are already on the market. Comparing the newest drive to SATA-based M.2 drives does not help much, I'd rather see it compared to what it supersedes. In this case, I'm more interested in a comparison with a PCIe 3.0 4-lane M.2 SSD drive that doesn't support NVMe. The drive specification for the earlier non-NVMe SM951 is not that far off of that of the new drive. The earlier drive is rated at sequential read and write speeds of 2,150 MB/sec 1,500 MB/sec respectively. Again, not all that far off.
That being said...I'm curious to see the difference that NVMe makes in real-world benchmarks, and where the difference is...especially because I just built a new system with a non-NVMe SM951 SSD. :)
-Turkey
No it's not. Apple does not support NVME so there are no NVME drives in any Apple products.
Not true. The 2015 Macbook uses an NVMe drive.
No it's not. Apple does not support NVME so there are no NVME drives in any Apple products.
Yet....
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Apple tried to monopolise FireWire in the same way as they've tried to monopolise thunderbolt. And the same thing has happened. Sure, there are and will be niche uses, but Thunderbolt's opportunity to be The Standard for next gen peripherals has passed.
There is a nice improvement going from AHCI to NVMe protocol, though. I/O gets lower latency, less CPU intensive, less "blocking".
That may seem "philosophical" still. At a first approximation latency is halved. The tech will be a good thing to have once the drives get plentiful and cheap.
Weren't workstations of the 80s and 90s just powerful microcomputers?
CPU with memory protection (e.g. 68010 plus MMU), SCSI disks, high resolution (about a megapixel), several megabytes of memory, advanced OS : Unix-like, Windows NT or something else.
By that measure, any good low end desktop computer is a workstation. By 2001, that had Windows XP and Ultra DMA IDE modes ; a decade or less later we had SATA with NCQ (no need for SCSI), support for dual monitor and SMP as standard (dual and quad core).