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

Winner/winner, Chicken Dinner

[turkeydance]

finally, news for nerds: non-OEM, NVMe, SSD, and 950....all in one sentence. well played, sir.

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:Winner/winner, Chicken Dinner

[Overzeetop]

The good news is you could have a 80Gb/s Raid 0. The bad news is that it would be bottlenecked by a 6Gb/s transfer bus.

At what point will SDRAM quantites go down?

[Overzeetop]

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?

Re:At what point will SDRAM quantites go down?

[swb]

The Samsung stick has only 20% of the speed of DDR3 and enough extra latency that it would be a painful step backward.

Although isn't that basically the system used by smartphones and tablets? Suspend the app and page it to flash when you switch to another context? But they also have much smaller applications and have like 1-2 GM RAM to begin with.

I think where that system might work better overall is on virtualization hosts where active memory is much lower than assigned memory. Those inactive pages available on a fast swap drive would make high density hosts a lot less painful than generic disk swapping.

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.