Samsung 950 Pro Brings NVMe To M.2, Over 2.5GB/s

Vigile writes: Samsung just released its first non-OEM, consumer level NVMe enabled SSD, the 950 Pro series. This drive will ship in an M.2 form factor rather than a 2.5-in drive size that is the standard for users today, allowing installation into notebooks, small form factor PCs and desktop PCs that have at least one M.2 slot on-board. It peaks at 512GB capacity today but Samsung promises a 1TB version using 48-layer VNAND in 2016. The NVMe protocol allows much better performance directly over the PCIe bus without the overhead of the AHCI protocol used in hard drives and previous SSDs. PC Perspective's review has performance breaking the 2.5GB/s read speed level while also introducing an entirely new type of performance evaluation for SSDs centered around latency distribution of IOs. By measuring how long each IO takes, rather than reporting only an average, the performance of an SSD can be determined on a per-workflow basis and drives can be compared in an entirely new light. There is a lot of detail on to be read over and digested but again the new NVMe Samsung 950 Pro impresses. Hot Hardware takes a similarly data-dump-heavy look at the same drive.

Comments

Re:Winner/winner, Chicken Dinner

[sexconker]

Legitimately the goodest and nerdest news I've heard on Slashdot in a long time.

And for those of us with desktops without PCIe, M-keyed, M.2 slots, there are adapters.
Bootability depends om your mobo/bios/uefi/hairdo.

Re:M.2 is awesome

[zAPPzAPP]

Oh one thing though:
Win7 M.2 support does not seem to exist. No success installing that one for me.
Win8 no idea (but from what I could find online, it seems to be tricky).
Win10 works.
Linux Mint works.

Re: M.2 is awesome

[slaker]

Windows 7 support is iffy, but I've gotten it to work on X99 boards with some drives (Plextor in my case). I couldn't get either Samsung or Plextor drives to boot Windows 7 in a ThinkPad T450 though.

Yes, they're fast. They're also REALLY warm. They're downright uncomfortable to touch with a finger after they're been on for a while. Keep that in mind if you are thinking about sticking in your laptop.