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  • blanarahul - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Can't wait to see what Intel brings to the table considering the amount of focus they put on consistency.
  • extide - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I'm not sure that we will see anything too interesting client side from them. They seemed to have moved all their focus to the enterprise side, which is of course where the bulk of the money is.

    FWIW, Intel already has a PCIe SSD that is arguably faster -- the Intel SSD DC P3700
  • dylan522p - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Is, not arguably
  • Stuka87 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    It is faster, and certainly more reliable. Intel has the best enterprise SSDs on the market.
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    -- Intel has the best enterprise SSDs on the market.

    Among consumer facing companies, perhaps. The real enterprise SSD/flash players are largely unknown to AnandTech and its readers.
  • monsted - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    I'd love to see the results of a HDS FMD compared to the usual suspects.
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    We've had this conversation before and I'll tell you this again: the majority of flash array vendors are using SSDs from Intel, SanDisk, Samsung and others. There are some that design and build their own drives/blades (e.g. Violin and Skyera), but the vast majority is using third party drives as the heart of their flash arrays.
  • GTVic - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    All drives now should support eDrive.
  • Railgun - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    At the rate I'm going, I'll end up with one of these before my XP941 ever gets powered up once, retail or otherwise.
  • Laststop311 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Disappointed in lack of 1TB size/ no 3d vnand/ no nvme. I planned on using 1 of these in 1TB size for a boot drive for a skylake-e build. The good news is I have a couple years for samsung to fix those issues.
  • Laststop311 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Also forgot to add really need the 1TB size because 25% OP is important to keep the drive fast 100% of the time.
  • theduckofdeath - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Are you using your PC as the google.com web portal? :)
    Isn't 25% a bit excessive for a PC? I have 10% now and I can't really notice any difference from my previous install when I had around 15%....
  • philipma1957 - Saturday, February 28, 2015 - link

    I agree with you as always ssd's are too small. I would love to get a 2tb ssd or even a 1.5tb ssd

    in pcie or 2.5 inch form factors. My needs are about 1.2tb space. I would like the 1 drive and just forget about it.
  • RazrLeaf - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    So when is someone going to make a PCIe SSD with a black PCB? It sounds trivial, but it's pretty easy to fix. A green SSD would stuck out like a sore thumb on a motherboard with a black PCB.
  • vLsL2VnDmWjoTByaVLxb - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Probably when greater than 1% of the market even cares.
  • sablesg - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Plextor has a black edition of their M6e drive. Although I believe that comes with a pcie slot to M.2 adapter, and I'm not sure if they plan to sell just the drive alone.
  • eanazag - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    This is a PC OEM drive with the likelihood of it ending up in a laptop/tablet, so PCB color is not of high importance unless it is Apple. Apple PCBs are usually black.

    Expect something more visually appealing in retail versions.

    I'd be more interested in thermal pads or heat spreaders for this drive.
  • cm2187 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Personally I will NOT buy this until the engraving on the chips are using the font Courrier.
  • bigboxes - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Brav-freakin'-o
  • MykeM - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    You can get the original SSD part from Apple via iFixit. It's not cheap but it comes with black PCB (because Apple uses back PCB on MBP logic boards):

    https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/MacBook-Pro-13-In...
  • 3DoubleD - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    While this drive looks great and all, after all the problems the 840EVO has had, it is hard to get excited about big benchmark numbers from a Samsung drive... you never know if they will stay that way. That said, this drive is MLC and not TLC, so less chance of similar issues as the 840EVO. Still, Samsung has a lot of work to repair their reputation with their customers.
  • theduckofdeath - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Yeah, they only have a bit more than 1/4 of the market. Really suffering from that snafu... I think you're overreacting just a bit... :)
  • 3DoubleD - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    How could their past sales possibly have suffered from a problem that is ongoing and developing? How future customers react will depend on whether Samsung properly addresses the current issues. My comment is based on this fact.
  • theduckofdeath - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I have an Evo 840 and since the performance restoration fix I have not seen any sign of performance degradation on my drive. And that fix was made in October last year.
  • theduckofdeath - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    And just to clarify hwo desperate your trolling attempts are. It took (a limited number of) users a year to realise there even could be issues. That's how rare and hard to notice it was, even though the Evo 840 is probably the most sold SSD ever.
  • K_Space - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I am not sure if you are aware, however Samsung has released a recent statement to the effect that there remain issues with the 840 EVO drive and the above fix has not provided a permenant resolution:
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/8997/samsung-release...
    I have an XP941 and SD Extreme Pro 480; it'd sensible to see how Samsung deals with the current situation at hand which may tip me and other enthusiasts (? <5% of their SSD sales) one way or the other.
  • extide - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Not really, Samsung has many other great drives, even older ones that are/were still great like the 830, 840 pro, etc. Couple teething issues on early TLC drives, thats pretty much what to expect ion this industry. The MAIN thing is that they are infact handling it, and not just shuffling it under the rug. IMHO thats far more important than anything else.
  • smilingcrow - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    "The MAIN thing is that they are in fact handling it"

    The MAIN thing for me is when they have HANDLED it and the solution sticks over time as only then would I trust one of their TLC drives again.
    If that fails I expect a product recall which they haven't offered on the vanilla 840 yet which seemingly still has no fix. No recall = NOT handling it.
  • 3DoubleD - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Teething issues - OK, that's fine, as long as they fix them, and that's all I've been saying; however, the verdict is still out as to whether they have fixed them or not, and that was my initial point.

    The minute they apply a permanent firmware fix or, if a firmware fix is not possible, a recall, then they will have handled it and I'd feel future Samsung purchases were justified. This obviously applies most strongly for Samsung TLC products, but how Samsung responds to SSD issues in general should be of interest of any current and potential Samsung SSD owner (TLC or MLC).
  • cm2187 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    What problems are you referring to?
  • iLovefloss - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Samsung's first two TLC drives, the 840 and 840 EVO, has some firmware issues that cause month old data to be read slowly. The severity ranges from slower than a speedy HDD to as slow as a SATA2 SSD. Samsung's first patch didn't resolve the issue for all the 840 EVO SSDs suffering from the slowdowns or only temporarily resolved, so Samsung is in the process of making another patch.
  • kgh00007 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    I have an 840 EVO and I applied the firmware fix in October last year and the reads have dropped again to below 50MB/s on older data, ie. my OS files and stuff that was installed when I first set the drive up.

    I will be waiting to see how Samsung handle this before I buy another SSD from them. Benchmarks and reviews mean nothing if an SSD drops below HDD read speeds after a few months of real world use.

    Cold boot now takes minutes, not seconds!!
  • 3DoubleD - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Exactly. I have one drive that has sequential read minimums as low as 8.8MB/s and large portions averaging 50MB/s. Another drive is fine and operates at 300MB/s consistently (although I'm pretty sure that should be higher on SATA3, but day-to-day that is fast enough not to notice). They need to squash this bug if they plan on selling TLC drives in the future in any real volume. Enthusiasts will care, which is admittedly a small market, but I think some laptop vendors might begin to take notice and avoid Samsung TLC products as well, and that's a larger market.
  • Irish_adam - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    So when are they going to make a desktop version with a heatsink on it? It seems like everyone is so obsessed with portables these days that the desktop crowed is getting ignored but surely this kind of performance would mainly be used for a desktop machine than an ultra thin laptop. Its my main gripe with PCIe SSDs atm
  • dananski - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Same occurred to me. Could probably get a substantial boost in long-running operations by attaching a heatsink. Should be easy enough to do yourself - thermal tape and some old vram heatsinks would probably do the trick without being so heavy as to break the pcie slot.

    I would like to see the rate of heat dissipation after heavy use (i.e. how that temperature graph looks after you stop writing to the disk). It starts throttling after roughly 180GB sequential, which is plenty for most scenarios, but how long does it take to cool back down again for your next big write? Does throttling occur under more mixed, sustained loads like a database server? Not exactly my kind of use cases, but I'd be interested to see.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    "However, it's nowhere near the maximum bandwidth of the PCIe 3.0 x4 bus, though, which should be about 3.2GB/s (PCIe only has ~80% efficiency with overhead after the 128b/132b scheme used by PCIe 3.0)."

    Where's the 20% loss coming from? 128/132 bit encoding only has a 3% overhead, is this an incompletely updated copy/paste from a description of PCIe 2.0? The 8/10bit encoding used in the older version did have a 20% penalty.
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    That's the overhead on top of the encoding scheme and is a rough figure based on our own testing with GPU memory bandwidth that will saturate the interface.

    It's the same in PCIe 2.0 too: the interface is good for 5GT/s per lane, which equals 500MB/s per lane once you take the 8b/10b encoding and bits to bytes translation into account. However, in real world the best bandwidths I've seen have been about 390MB/s per lane.
  • extide - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Protocol overhead (NOT the 120/132b part) -- the commands and stuff, interrupt latency from the cpu and other devices, DMA latencies on read/write to main system memory, etc.
  • Hulk - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Would it be possible to display the entire AS SSD results window?
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I only run the sequential test, but I can certainly switch to running the full test and publishing the results as a screenshot if that's preferred.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    "In any case, I strongly recommend having a decent amount of airflow inside the case. My system only has two case fans (one front and one rear) and I run it with the side panels off for faster accessibility, so mine isn't an ideal setup for maximum airflow."

    With the space between a pair of PCIe x16 slots appearing to have become the most popular spot to put M2 slots I worry that thermal throttling might end up being worse for a lot of end user systems than on your testbench because it'll be getting broiled by GPUs. OTOH even with a GPU looming overhead, it should be possible to slap an aftermarket heatsink on using thermal tape. My parts box has a few I think would work that I've salvaged from random hardware (single wide GPUs???) over the years; if you've got anything similar lying around I'd be curious if it'd be able to fix the throttling problem.
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I have a couple Plextor M6e Black Edition drives, which are basically M.2 adapters with an M.2 SSD and a quite massive heatsink. I currently have my hands full because of upcoming NDAs, but I can certainly try to test the SM951 with a heatsink and the case fully assembled before it starts to ship.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Ok, I'd definitely be interested in seeing an update when you've got the time. Thanks.
  • Railgun - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    While I can see it's a case of something is better than nothing, given the mounting options of an M.2 drive, a couple of chips will not get any direct cooling benefit. In fact, they're sitting in a space where virtually zero airflow will be happening.

    The Plextor solution. and any like it is all well and good, but for those that utilize a native M.2 port on any given mobo, they're kind of out of luck. As it turns out, I also have a GPU blocking just above mine for any decent sized passive cooling; 8cm at best. Maybe that's enough, but the two chips on the other side have the potential to simply cook.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Depends if it's the flash chips or the ram/controller that're overheating. I think the latter two are on top and heat sinkable.
  • jhoff80 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    It'd be even worse too for many of the mini-ITX boards that are putting the M.2 slot underneath the board.

    I mean, something like M.2 is ideal for these smaller cases where cabling can become an issue, so having the slot on the bottom of the board combined with a drive needing airflow sounds like grounds for a disaster.
  • extide - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Yeah I bet it's the controller that is being throttled, because IT is overheating, not the actual NAND chips.
  • ZeDestructor - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I second this motion. Prefereably as a seperate article so I don't miss it (I only get to AT via RSS nowadays)
  • rpg1966 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Maybe a dumb question, but: the 512GB drive has 4 storage chips (two on the front, two on the back), therefore each chip stores 128GB. If the NAND chips are 64Gbit (8GB), that means there are 16 packages in each chip - is that right?
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    That is correct. Samsung has been using 16-die packages for quite some time now in various products.
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Quick question;
    Is anyone going beyond that limit on 2D nand ?
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I don't think anyone has stacked more than 16 dies currently. Right now Samsung is the only one shipping 16-die packages in volume, whereas others are either still developing or only shipping in very limited quantities (e.g. Toshiba's 16-die packages are ~3x more expensive in terms of $/GB).
  • baii9 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    great review and new test suite, on the mx100 I mean. Clearly show that top tier ssds( 850 pro, extreme pro) is hardly better than a budget drive. would be awesome if you guys can throw arc 100 into the mix.
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I was only able to test a bunch of drives for this review and chose the drives that I found the most relevant, but the ARC 100 will definitely be tested soon.
  • hojnikb - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    yeah, that would be great.
    ARC 100 is getting cheaper every day here in EU and its currently the best buy in ~256GB segment.
  • danjw - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Since there are multiple form factors, it would be nice if you included the form factor for M.2 drives.
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    It's mentioned right after the table, but I've also added it to the table now so it can't be missed.
  • danjw - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Thanks!
  • aggiechase37 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Yeah, but if something goes terribly wrong with the drive, can we trust Samsung to do the right thing? Replace the 840 EVO's, or Samsung, you're dead to me.
  • aggiechase37 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    So the only way to get a Samsung #fail drive is to get a Lenovo #spyware laptop? Let me just jump right all over that.
  • Kevin G - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    "I also verified that the SM951 is bootable in tower Mac Pros (2012 and earlier)."

    Excellent. The old 2010/2012 towers continue to show that being expandable provides long term benefit. I'm glad that I picked up my tower Mac Pro when I did.

    Now to find a carrier that'll convert the 4x PCIe 3.0 link of the M.2 connector to an 8x PCIe 2.0 link for a Mac Pro. (Two two M.2s to a single 16x PCIe 2.0 link.)
  • extide - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    You will need a PLX chip to do that, you can't just put 2 x4 devices into an x8 slot...
  • jimjamjamie - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    It's pretty hilarious how many people drink the shiny plastic trash bin kool-aid.
  • Tunnah - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I'm not super knowledgeable on the whole thing, but isn't NVMe really only a big deal for enterprise, as it's more a benefit for multi drive setups ?
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    It's of course a bigger deal for enterprises because the need for performance is higher. However, NVMe isn't just a buzzword for the client space because it reduced the protocol latency, which in turn results in higher performance at low queue depths that are common for client workloads.
  • knweiss - Sunday, March 1, 2015 - link

    Kristian, did you ever test how much influence the filesystem has? I would love to see a filesystem comparison on the various platforms with NVMe drivers (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc).
  • The_Assimilator - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Hopefully NVMe will be standard on SSDs by the time Skylake and 100-series chipsets arrive.
  • sna1970 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    What is the point of this expensive drive when you can have the same numbers using 2 SSD in Raid 0 ?

    and please no one says to me risk of Data Loss .. SSD are not mechanical and the chance of loosing 1 SSD is the same of 2 of them.
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    RAID only tends to increase high QD and large IO transfers where the IO load can easily be distributed between two or more drives. Low QD performance at small IO sizes can actually be worse due to additional overhead from the RAID drivers.
  • dzezik - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Hi sna1970. You misses Bernouli's "introduced the principle of the maximum product of the probabilities of a system of concurrent errors" it is quite old 1782 but is is still valid. Have You ever been in school. Do You have mathematics classes?
  • Makaveli - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I would love to see two Samsung 850Pro 256GB drives in Raid 0 vs this.
  • BPB - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    I was really hoping to see this compared to a RAID 0 setup. I'm considering getting one of these or a competitor's version in 2 or 3 months, but I'm also considering just getting another Samsung SSD and creating a RAID 0 setup.
  • Flash13 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Why trust Samsung? I don't anymore.
  • youtard - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    hurr!
  • icrf - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Suggestion for the graphs/charts picked from a drop down: make them all have the same scale, so when flipping between them, it's easier to compare from a visual shift. Ideally, it wouldn't be a drop down, but a set of checkboxes that would show/hide each line graph on the same chart to see more than one at once. If you're pre-rendering the charts, I understand how that would be a problem.
  • Edgar_in_Indy - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    It would be a lot easier to get excited about this drive if there were real-world numbers to look at. I find it frustrating that most hard drive reviews don't show some basic load times. You know, how long to boot windows, to load a level in a game, copy a huge file, etc.

    It would make it much easier to judge the relative performance of drives, and decide whether the results justify the upgrade cost.
  • willis936 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    While it requires more technical knowledge from the reader it actually gives a lot more useful info. Time to load windows? Is that on first boot after install? After updates? After 100 programs are installed? After 10 r/w cycles? After the drive isfiles filled? With overprovisioning? I'd personally much rather synthetic tests that cover most cases so you can extrapolate subjective performance from it. You just have to know which workloads line up with which tests.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Page 2 of the article, section "A Word About Storage Benches and Real World Tests".

    TLDR version: "Too much background IO for consistent results to be possible."
  • Edgar_in_Indy - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    From that same section: "I know some of you have criticized our benchmarks due to the lack of real world application tests, but the unfortunate truth is that it's close to impossible to build a reliable test suite that can be executed in real time. Especially if you want to test something else than just boot and application launch times, there is simply too many tasks in the background that cannot be properly controlled to guarantee valid results. "

    Okay, then. So a complicated real-world test is difficult to duplicate. But why can't we at least have the simple "boot and application launch times" he referenced? And what about a large file copy, like I already mentioned? That's something most people could easily relate to. And time to compress a large group of files? Etc.

    If the whole idea of an SSD is to do things faster, then it would be helpful to get a stopwatch involved in these types of review, at least a little bit!

    Or if it really is "Mission Impossible" to document any real world speed improvements, then I can't help but wonder if this is kind of like people paying premiums for high-performance memory, with very little real-world return.
  • zodiacfml - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Why not do a benchmark of a Windows installation in a virtual machine from a RAM disk?
  • Railgun - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Boot times are irrelevant as there, too, there are several variables. BIOS or UEFI? HW involved. Other applications involved. And in the grand scheme of things, it's a one and done thing. If someone is so concerned on booting taking 5 seconds over 30, one can assume they'd leave the thing on. It's an irrelevant metric. Installing an OS again is an irrelevant metric due to the HW involved once again. I've never understood the fascination over boot times.
  • Edgar_in_Indy - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Boot times and OS installation times (or game installation times, if it makes you feel better) would be interesting because they would be direct reflections of how a drive's theoretical speed is manifest in real world situations.

    I'm not really sure what your point is, and what you're arguing for. Why would you *not* want a few basic, real world metrics added to the other measurements? *Of course* the test system isn't going to be the same as every user's system. So what? We should still be able to glean some useful information about a drive's relative performance to other drives.

    Besides, I have seen some situations where the synthetic tests didn't look great for a particular drive, but in the real world tests it fared much better. This is what led me to choose the Crucial M4 when I was shopping for a 256GB SSD a couple years ago. It wasn't the darling of the synthetic tests, but in the real world scenarios it was right up there with the best of them. It did particularly well in Anand's "Light Workload" test, which seemed much more typical of real-world use than the stress-test type scenarios.

    And in regards to the "fascination" with boot times, I think that almost everybody prefers a computer that starts more quickly. I've been around since the DOS days, and that was the last time that I had a computer that booted in seconds, until recently. So having SSD's that can do the same is pretty dang cool to me.

    I guess you could also ask a car guy why they have a "fascination" with 0-60 times. I mean, how often will someone really need to get to 60 mph in 5.2 seconds? It's ridiculous to think that somebody would be so worried about 0-60 times, unless they're an Indy Car driver or something.

    And besides, there are too many variables (weather, humidity, altitude, tire conditions, driver skill, etc. etc.) to get a definitive 0-60 times, so we may as well junk the whole idea, and just assume that the $60,000 sports car is faster than the $30,000 sports car just because it puts up better numbers on the dyno or has a larger displacement engine.

    But I really can't believe I'm having to explain this...
  • Railgun - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link

    I can't believe you had to explain that as well. You said you want real world tests, which already exist and refer to it during your selection of the M4. How does loading an OS by itself reflect anything? A plain vanilla install is a case that everyone will have only once during the lifecycle of that particular install. You allude to the light workload being more typical, which in itself is more than fine. If you've looked at what's included in the test suites, in particular the destroyer, you'll see that what can be considered normal usage tasks are there.
    -Download/install games, play games,
    -Copy and watch movies,
    -Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan.
    How are those not real world tests? They're not synthetic tests. What was your real world scenario that showed the M4 was better than whatever you were comparing it to? Why is that worse, or different than a boot speed test? I too don't hold a lot of value in the synthetic marks. As you mention, it's more for bragging rights than anything else.

    I too remember the DOS days. Compared to that, there is no comparison as DOS, compared to Win7 is like comparing a Yugo to a Ferrari. They're both cars and get you from point A to B, but one is so much more than the other. Yes, they're both operating systems, but one has so much more to it and is more complicated than another. DOS 1.0 was about 4000 lines of code. Win7 is around 40 million. What about a nice striped down Linux build? That will load faster. What about Mac OS? Throw in a RAID controller and boot times get tossed out the window.

    I don't think anyone has been missing any boot time metrics in the history of testing drives, whether SSD or otherwise. I've not seen one single review anywhere that shows boot times. The ONLY time I've ever seen it was initial comparison between an HDD and SSD. It's a moot point. You know it will be quick. Kristian's point is dead on. We're in the realm of possible milliseconds here. There's no point for the metric.

    BTW, I am a car guy, and while 0-60 is all great, I'm more interested in the whole package. Handling, build quality, design, etc. :)
  • Edgar_in_Indy - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link

    I agree with most everything you said, but I would go back to my original gripe that there was no stopwatch involved. Data rates are great, and let's definitely keep them coming, but I would simply like to see some timed tests too. And even if the timed tests show little or no difference, then that is also a very valuable piece of information.

    My basic gripe with the article is that it does not clearly answer the question "Should I or shouldn't I?" Sure, some of the graphs are dramatic, but how much will they be manifest in the real world? I think the answer to "Should I buy it?" should be the payoff for reading a big review like this.

    And if we can now say that we've reached the point where the real-world difference between SSD's for 99.99% of users is negligible, then I guess it begs the question whether these types of in-depth articles are worth writing, and worth reading, for very much farther into the future.

    Kind of like how in-depth sound card reviews have mostly gone away, since we've reached the point where they just work without drawing attention to themselves. Unless you are in the tiny percentile where your occupation relies on having the best soundcard with very specific features, then you don't have to worry about it. Like I said, I came from the DOS days, and for many years soundcards were one of the hottest topics in PC hardware. Now they're pretty much a non-issue.

    To draw a non-computer parallel, I'm sure an engineer could also write a 7,000-word review of a particular garbage disposal, going into great detail on every aspect of how the unit is built, but it would be total overkill, because people basically just want to know if it works or not. If SSD's are reaching a level of near-parity, then how many people will want to wade through all the background information in minute detail?

    This has been a very informative discussion for me, and in a way it's refreshing to know that I no longer need to sweat about choosing an SSD in the future. That also means that I will be very unlikely to click articles or visit sites that are focused on SSD performance.
  • Railgun - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link

    I think you and will find, and Kristian, correct me if I'm wrong, that native nvme drives will increase perceived responsiveness as it allows for full on simultaneous read/write IOPS as opposed to unidirectional operations.

    That should show a nice increase in some scenarios.
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    I find that it's waste of time to run tests that show the obvious, which in this case is that boot and application launch times are the same for all drives. Like I said, it's starting to become common knowledge that for basic workloads there's no difference between SSDs and I've never argued against that.

    If I did real world testing, I would like to do it right. This means more than timing the boot time and how many tenths of a second it takes to launch a certain app. Frankly that has no value when you consider a power user's workload with dozens of apps already open, of which some might be rather IO intensive (like running a VM).

    In such scenarios it can be hard to time the absolute difference because we are talking about stuttering and not seconds long wait times, but it's something that many certainly don't want to experience.

    That said, I will probably craft something basic (boot, app and installation times) to show whether PCIe/NVMe has any relevance in basic IO workloads, but it's not something that I'm looking to make a part of our regular test suite since I don't think it gives an accurate picture of actual real world performance under multitasking workloads.
  • Edgar_in_Indy - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    So would you say we're reaching the point where having the "fastest" SSD is really mostly about bragging rights?

    If that's the case, then it seems like the two most important specifications of an SSD would be size and price (much like it is for platter HDD's now). It would certainly make shopping for an SSD much simpler, if relative speed is no longer a meaningful factor.
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Yes, and I don't think I've been trying shovel the high-end SSDs down people's throat.

    I think the SSD market mainly consists of two segments now, which are the mainstream and enthusiast/professional segments. For the mainstream segment, any modern SSD is good enough, which is why $/GB has been the dominating factor when I recommend drives for that market (and that's why the MX100 has been my recommendation for quite some time now if you've seen our "Best SSDs" articles).

    The high-end sector is different in the sense that the users tend to want the best performance they can get. In some cases it's just for the bragging rights, but there are also workloads where SSD performance really matters (multiple VMs, photo/video/audio editing, etc). Some of our tests are more geared towards these users and I think we've been pretty clear about that, but as you said the Light workload test does a good job of illustrating average consumer usage and frankly the difference between drives in that test is rather small.

    My goal has never been to push people to buy "faster" drives than they need and if some of my writings have come across as that then please, give me some examples and I'll try to learn from those.
  • Edgar_in_Indy - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    No, I'm not trying to say that you've been pushing people to faster or more expensive SSD's. And even if you were, I probably wouldn't know, since I don't read all the SSD articles on here and follow all the developments. I mostly just jump in every year or two when I'm shopping for upgrades, and I try to play catch-up at that point in order to make sure I'm spending my money as wisely as possible.

    So for someone like me, who doesn't follow this stuff religiously, it's good to know I don't need to worry about missing out on big speed gains by not getting the hottest SSD of the moment next time I want to upgrade.

    That being said, I'm still a little bit of a performance enthusiast, so I can't help but be curious when something like this comes along and shows the potential for big improvements over previous designs. That's why I was a little disappointed to not find much in the way of real-world results.

    Anyway, it's obvious you put a lot of time and effort into this review, and the some of the performance results really were dramatic, so this is some good work.
  • Redstorm - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Why when updating the storage bench system did you pick a motherboard without a m.2 x 4 PCIe 3.0 slot. The Asus Z97 Delux is only providing 2 x pcie 2.0 lanes to the onboard M.2 slot. seams a bit short sited with the impending avalanche of x4 PCIe 3.0 SSD controllers coming out. Your new bench system is obsolete before it began. Using PCIe adapters is old school..
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    PCIe adapters are fine for review purposes and are in fact more easily serviceable than M.2 slots tend to be.
  • Samus - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Thank you for pointing out all capacities are M2 2280 DOUBLE SIDED. That is missing from virtually all reviews, sales material and eCommerce sites for M2 drives. Newegg has been pretty good about taking pictures of both sides of many drives, though.

    This is important to me because I work with HP Elitebook's and the newest generation of the Elitebook 810 (G2) and 820\1040 all require single-sided. The 840 has room for M2 DS modules, though.
  • Flash13 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    The company is not trustworthy! Buy at your own risk. Good Luck.
  • youtard - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    hurr!
  • Wardrop - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Does this form factor work in standard desktop PCI-e 4x slots?
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    It's an m-2 plug, you need an adapter to fit it in a standard pcie slot.
  • wtallis - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    When discussing NVMe, please make it clear that the chipset and motherboard firmware only matter for booting off the drive; they don't need any updates to allow a compatible operating system to access the drive as something other than the boot volume.

    (As for what the motherboard firmware needs to gain in order to allow booting from NVMe devices, it's just a loadable UEFI device driver. Even if your motherboard doesn't have such a driver built-in, you could load it from some other storage device and then boot off the NVMe drive.)
  • ericgl21 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    I wonder if Samsung (or any other OEM) would be willing to sell a 1TB m.2 NVMe PCIe3.0 x4 SSD with SLC NAND with a 2280 form factor?
    Many professionals would appreciate the speed and reliability that SLC NAND provides.
    Sure, it would cost a lot, but so do the Samsung SM951 and Intel P3700.

    If that's not possible with current 16nm manufacturing, then a 512GB would also be nice. :-)
    Just my 2 cents.
  • baii9 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    reliable on nand? Reliable controller matters, high endurance nand matters, I think nand are "reliable' enough already(compare to that lovely controller).
  • IlikeSSD - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    looks like Samsung paid for not showing OCZ in consistency and mixed workload tests )))))
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    I didn't test any OCZ drives for this review because the Vector 180 NDA is due in a couple of days, so stay tuned.
  • IlikeSSD - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link

    Vertex 460A is good enough to show the difference (maybe even Arc))
  • Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    You should clip on a simple heatsink and run the tests again.
  • squatsh - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Based on the orientation of the drive in it's M2 slot. (Ie is the controller facing up or down) Can it be made clear if we could just put a small thermal pad and one of those tiny heatsinks (like you can get for VRMs) on the controller (assuming that is what is overheating) in order to stop the thermal throttling on desktops and laptops with enough space.
  • Luke212 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    what happened to the Intel P3500? It's been a year and nothing.
  • Mikemk - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Comment 100

    Sorry, couldn't resist
  • awall13 - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link

    Thanks for the great review. I like the changes in how the data is presented. One idea: In the performance consistency section, the steady-state performance could be presented with a single two-color bar per drive, with the full bar representing the average performance, and the shorter bar representing the average - 1 standard deviation. I'd still keep the second chart showing the standard deviation by itself, perhaps. Just a thought.
  • gseguin - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link

    Performance performance performance. Ok, I get it, its fast and hard to find.
    Since we saw many issues crop up with the predecessors, with eventual fixes by Samsung, how much confidence is there in the drive itself from Anandtech... You know the controllers, you know the memory, you've covered different company's testing methodologies, how much confidence do you have in this product, and why is that absent from the introduction and final thoughts?
  • Kristian Vättö - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link

    All Samsung's issues have been related to SSD with planar TLC NAND (i.e. 840 & 840 EVO). There is absolutely no reason to believe that the SM951 shares the issues because it's based on MLC NAND and Samsung's MLC NAND based SSDs have been flawless (830 & 840 Pro).
  • kgh00007 - Saturday, February 28, 2015 - link

    Hey, nice article. I like the new SSD test suite. Is there any way to add a long term read consistency test, or any sort of read consistency test in light of the Samsung 840 EVO issues?

    I'm an 840 EVO user with drops in read speed to below 50Mb/s. In fact I have never gotten the advertised 500MB/s read speeds on any SSD I own. Is that because I am using them as the boot drive?

    Do you test with the SSD as a second drive in the system? So taking out the overhead of the OS running on the drive as well as the test suite?

    Cheers, keep up the good work, I've been learning from this site for a long time....
  • Kristian Vättö - Sunday, March 1, 2015 - link

    The 840 EVO issue takes weeks, even months to show up, so testing it is not something that we can really incorporate in our test suite.

    The read speed depends on the test you use and its specifications. The figures are always "up to" and tend to be based on high queue depth 128KB sequential read performance. You may want to try multiple benchmarking apps, but especially ATTO tends to show high performance since it tests multiple IO sizes.

    And yes, we run the SSD as a secondary drive to eliminate any OS overhead.
  • MFinn3333 - Saturday, February 28, 2015 - link

    Is there any way you can review the Fujitsu FSX 240GB? It's an old drive but it is the only consumer level drive that I am aware of that uses entirely SLC?
  • Kristian Vättö - Sunday, March 1, 2015 - link

    At least for now it's not in the review queue, but I will keep it in mind in case I have excess time.
  • kenshinco - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link

    How can we get the sm951 to runs up to the rated speed? The rated speed for 512gb is 2.15gbs/1550mbs read/write, but i got only 1560mbs/1570mbs read/write. I got temp monitor never pass 75 when testing.
  • Kristian Vättö - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link

    I was able to achieve 2250MB/s with 128KB sequential read (QD32) on an empty drive, which is how the read performance has been rated. That's not a realistic bench, though, because in reality you will never be reading from an empty drive.
  • Gonemad - Thursday, March 5, 2015 - link

    No word on Novachips 8TB SSD yet?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/05/eight_tera...
  • CallsignVega - Friday, March 6, 2015 - link

    I just purchased the SM951 from the UK (512GB for $450). They are out there, you just have to know where to look.
  • vegipiniata - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link

    I got one SM951 512GB for 340£
    They were gone later that day.
    Have Z97 Extreme9 and can't set it as the boot drive though :(
    Bios 1.3 from DEC 2014
    any chance it's the BIOS fault (too old)?
  • Stas - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link

    There we go. Finally an incentive to upgrade from 2500k to a new platform. Once mobos with M.2 and NVM hit the market in Summer/Fall, I will be retiring the faithful rig.
  • Edgar_in_Indy - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link

    The 2500k is too good to retire!

    When I upgraded my main system a few weeks ago, I recycled my old 2500k and the board for use in a living room HTPC build that can handle 4K video files and do some gaming, all while running Windows Media Center with 5 ATSC tuners.
  • peevee - Friday, March 20, 2015 - link

    IOmeter? Packing several weeks/months of IO into a several minutes/hours test? Seriously, your tests have become SO artificial as not to correspond to any real life experiences at all. For example, in real life SSD write speed almost does not matter, because almost always they are asynchronous - write happens into cache and user does not wait anything, or speed of writes is limited by the speed of data acquisition - case in point, you download test is always limited by much slower internet speed, or copying pictures off camera/SD card are limited by much slower camera/reader, USB or SD speeds etc. Background backup, happening without a user AT ALL? Come on!
    It would be actually much more interesting to see at least a few REAL numbers, like good old starting Windows or copying a catalog full of pictures and videos or starting a VM. So the users would see what amount of their time they would REALLY save by investing extra into a faster drive.
  • kishisaki - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link

    How did you get all those speed with Asus Z97 Deluxe?
    I thought it only has a 10Gb/s M.2 Slot?
  • Gradius2 - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link

    My solution is WAYYYY cheaper and bigger, I have 670GB (real size) on my little RAID, see the performance: http://i61.tinypic.com/2vt9mo6.jpg
  • xyvyx2 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link

    I was able to keep the temps down on my SM951 by attaching a small heatsink... I need to do some data logging, but I don't think it's gone over 60C since:
    http://s76.photobucket.com/user/xyvyx/media/Comput...">[IMG]http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j9/xyvyx/Compute...[/IMG]
  • stevae - Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - link

    why isn't there a trouble shoot included IF your result comes back that the drive DOES NOT have trim working? this is incomplete article.
  • Invisibleman - Sunday, August 16, 2015 - link

    Kristian,

    Because I didn't read this review earlier and I am now planning to upgrade my PC to an M2 SSD. I came to this review.

    But there is one thing I realy don't understand. As the setup is saying, you have tested with de Asus Z97 DeLuxe. I know there are 2 different versions of this one. 1 is with USB 3.1 support (new version) and 1 with USB 3.0 (Old one) this one I have.

    But if I look at the specs then the Z97 DeLuxe shares the bandwide with SataExpress 1 and have only 2 x PCI Express 3.0/2.0 x 16 Slots (Single at 16x or dual at x8/x8 Mode)

    But as I read the SM951 needs to have PCI 3.0 x 4bus. Am I missing something? For me it seems that the SM951 can't run full speed on this board. If it goes thru Sata Express then also get only PCI 3.0 X 2. But in the test (charts) you are mention PCI 3.0 x 4. How is this possible to get if the Max is PCI 3.0 x 2?

    So can you tell me what I am missing? What do I need to do/buy extra to get this one run one full power meaning PCI 3.0 x 4.

    Regards,
    Hans
  • Hoogmade - Monday, December 7, 2015 - link

    What card is used to use the SM951 in a Mac Pro 2012?
    I tried the Addonics ADM2PX4 but that doesn't seem to work.
  • dtscaps - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link

    Ok, this is supposed to be a review to guide me what SSD to buy. I read 10 pages of performance specs and 72 more comments dealing with microseconds marginality. The fact that this drive does or does not have an AES self encrypting mechanism adering to OPAL 2 with a possible IEEE1667 extension IS IMPORTANT. IT IS A COMPLETE SHOW STOPPER if the drive cannot encrypt data. Maybe except if you are a kid playing with new toys.

    So, is this SSD self encrypting ?
    Does it support Opal 2
    Does it support the IEEE1667 extension?

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