Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD Announced

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Gawd
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Jun 12, 2007
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Just doing my daily read on Guru3d and saw this.

Good to see NVMe come to a more consumer oriented product than Intel's offerings.

Having just bought a non-NVMe SM951 a few months ago, I thought It'd be annowed, but instead I feel like I'll still get plenty of use out of it. Although I can't wait to see software start taking use of the speed and parrelelism of what this should ovver.


950 Pro specs:
Reads:
2,500 MBps
300,000 IOPS

Writes:
1,500 MBps
110,000

These are for the 256GB model, no word on other capacities however.
 
I was very near in buying the Samsung SM951 NVMe and now they announced the 950 PRO.

Now I don't know if it worth waiting the 950 PRO or buying the SM951.
 
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sblantipodi said:
I was very near in buying the Samsung SM951 NVMe and now they announced the 950 PRO.

Now I don't know if it worth waiting the 950 PRO or buying the SM951.
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I would wait, the SM951 was never meant to be a consumer product.
 
Finally, a retail competitor for the Intel 750. It's on now.. until Optane, anyway.
 
Also, it's disappointing that these still top out at 512GB, but the pricing is killer, so to me it evens out.
 
I have a Z77 mobo, am I correct in thinking that I can't use an NVMe drive? Around Christmas I want to buy a bigger SSD than my current 120Gb to clean install Win 10. I was going to get a Samsung 850 Pro 500Gb but these new drives look very tempting!

Unfortunately I won't be in a position to upgrade my mobo (and therefore CPU and RAM) any time soon; if I can't use NVMe now on a Z77 mobo, is there a chance it will be made to work in the near future as a boot drive?
 
Camberwell said:
I have a Z77 mobo, am I correct in thinking that I can't use an NVMe drive? Around Christmas I want to buy a bigger SSD than my current 120Gb to clean install Win 10. I was going to get a Samsung 850 Pro 500Gb but these new drives look very tempting!

Unfortunately I won't be in a position to upgrade my mobo (and therefore CPU and RAM) any time soon; if I can't use NVMe now on a Z77 mobo, is there a chance it will be made to work in the near future as a boot drive?
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I think you can, at least I have seen reports of people using the Intel 750 drives on Z77 boards. If you buy one of the m.2 drives you'll likely need a PCIe adapter. Getting it set up as the boot drive sounds tricky on some boards.
 
I hope they release a 128gb version. I only want to put OS and a few media apps on it. Will be buying x2. Main rig and file server.
 
mw8t said:
I hope they release a 128gb version. I only want to put OS and a few media apps on it. Will be buying x2. Main rig and file server.
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meh, 256 is small enough for 2015. I'd jump if I were you, you'll find a use for that extra space on such a fast drive
 
This kind of speed seems a waste for an OS drive, if you are putting games and larger programs on other drives. Any SSD will do for an OS drive.
 
Monkey God said:
This kind of speed seems a waste for an OS drive, if you are putting games and larger programs on other drives. Any SSD will do for an OS drive.
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I'm not interested in the 'speed' it's the latency I'm after. I want instant everything.
 
Zangmonkey said:
Until 3d X-Point, anyway.
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Not really.

Neither SATA Express nor PCIE can provide enough bandwidth for that. Last I read the plan is to have 3D X-Point modules slip into the same sort of slots as DDR4 RAM slots - if not actual DDR4 slots. It's gonna be a while before drives like that are available and motherboards that can support them. Even then, for all those people not on platforms that can support it, NVMe drives like the Intel 750 and Samsung 950 will be the best they can get.
 
Chris_Lonardo said:
Finally, a retail competitor for the Intel 750. It's on now.. until Optane, anyway.
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my thoughts exactly. I really need to replace my Sandisk Extreme Pro and I was really hoping for a 1 TB option but I will have to suffice for the 512GB. I will be buying this on the first day assuming there isn't price guaging (SP?) on day 1. This will tithe me over til optane comes out and I am loving the 400 TBW! That will take me a long time to kill even at 100-150 GBs per day woot woot! That is 4x the warranty endurance per GB compared to Intel 750 so Intel can eat shit and loose my 1 grand :)

Shameless Liar said:
Not really.

Neither SATA Express nor PCIE can provide enough bandwidth for that. Last I read the plan is to have 3D X-Point modules slip into the same sort of slots as DDR4 RAM slots - if not actual DDR4 slots. It's gonna be a while before drives like that are available and motherboards that can support them. Even then, for all those people not on platforms that can support it, NVMe drives like the Intel 750 and Samsung 950 will be the best they can get.
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It will be in U.2, PCIe and DIMM form factor. The major let down of PCIe is the significantly higher latency. There is a bandwidth issue but thats not as big of an issue as the increased latency. The latency IIRC is 40x higher in PCIe vs DIMM and that is if it is not worse than that. That is the major issue because it killed single thread IOPs

mw8t said:
I'm not interested in the 'speed' it's the latency I'm after. I want instant everything.
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my thoughts exactly. That is why i hope people are wrong and they do release the damn XPoint DIMMs next year. I want a damn 256GB OS/Primary programs. I loathe the 1-2s word and PDF and programs take to load.
 
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I'm concerned about slapping one of these in an M.2 slot parked under a pair of Titan X's.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
my thoughts exactly. I really need to replace my Sandisk Extreme Pro and I was really hoping for a 1 TB option but I will have to suffice for the 512GB. I will be buying this on the first day assuming there isn't price guaging (SP?) on day 1. This will tithe me over til optane comes out and I am loving the 400 TBW! That will take me a long time to kill even at 100-150 GBs per day woot woot! That is 4x the warranty endurance per GB compared to Intel 750 so Intel can eat shit and loose my 1 grand :)



It will be in U.2, PCIe and DIMM form factor. The major let down of PCIe is the significantly higher latency. There is a bandwidth issue but thats not as big of an issue as the increased latency. The latency IIRC is 40x higher in PCIe vs DIMM and that is if it is not worse than that. That is the major issue because it killed single thread IOPs



my thoughts exactly. That is why i hope people are wrong and they do release the damn XPoint DIMMs next year. I want a damn 256GB OS/Primary programs. I loathe the 1-2s word and PDF and programs take to load.
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Yeah good points... My SSD setup is fairly fast with 800MB.s read/writes, but it doesn't make a bit of difference over too many other SSDs as far as user experience. I want maximum snappiness.
 
this looks kind of neat. Was going to pull the trigger on a Intel 750, but would be interesting to see how the benchmarks compare
 
@mw8t The instant everything will also never exactly happen either for the single reason fo single thread for the CPU as well. I know several programs i have run in RAM to test some ideas out and the issue I run into is single thread bottleneck on the CPU.

The level of laziness in program drives me nuts. There is no reason in hell that my PDF scanner can not convert a page to searchable text per CPU thread or core. That is plainly shitty coding. I watch an 80 page document take 3 mins or whatever to convert because it is using only 1 thread! I understand on not wanting to thread a single page into multiple sections but seriously! I have 4 cores 8 threads and I cant have a page being converted by each frackin core!
 
Any chance the 950 will have a boot rom like the Kingston HyperX (to support older PCs)?
 
Should have native support for Z97/X99/Z170 boards. Z68 and up can usually be supported after modifying the UEFI ROM to add the NVMe components. Possibly as far back as certain X58 boards.
 
sblantipodi said:
NVMe drives will not work on PC that does not support that standard. So no.
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it works in a PCIe card but not bootable without special modifying.

I want this now!!!!!!!!! God I am pissed to wait for this! I want to dump my Sandisk Extreme Pro so bad.
 
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