Slashdot Mirror
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.
finally, news for nerds: non-OEM, NVMe, SSD, and 950....all in one sentence. well played, sir.
Don't get me wrong - we're not there yet, for write endurance or for absolute speed. Not many people are going to consider a warranty of 800 write cycles sufficient for RAM usage.
Still, transfer speeds on DDR3 are in the 12GB/s range (at 1600MHz), and recent testing shows DDR4 speed isn't really providing a huge benefit to actual computing. Sequential writes, as I would mostly expect moving from SDRAM to a swapfile, is within an order of magnitude of DDR3 speeds, and more like 1:5 for reads where responsiveness matters.
Are we going to get to the point in the next 3-5 years where most people are scaling back to 2-4GB of RAM in favor of using the swapfile on a PCIe SSD? Might we see low power machines eschewing SDRAM except for graphics memory and zero page, as many dropped discrete graphics for onboard GPUs half a dozen years ago?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I've got the (presumably?) OEM version in my current desktop: Samsung SM951 M.2
As far as I can tell, load times don't exist anymore. ;)
The thing is also surprisingly small, more so than you would expect from pictures. You could probably fit 20 of these into the space of a 2.5in drive.