Samsung 950PRO, when?


December 1st? Let me reiterate my last post.

BTW Thanks for posting that

FUCK YOU SAMMY!!!! I WANT NOW!!!


anyways....those damn lies. Early October...way to burst my bubble :/

Thanks for the update boss! I am stopping my daily google search til the 28th
 

Nice! Thanks for posting.

Me, personally, I'm going to pass for quite a while. I use my computer for mostly gaming, so an "old fashioned" SATA is still perfectly adequate. Especially since that $350 for the 512GB variant would be better spend on a 2.5" with double the capacity. When my 3770K starts getting long in the tooth, which it absolutely isn't right now, then I'll probably build a new system that can house at least two M.2 NVMe drives - 1TB for boot/primary, and 2-4TB for games/storage...as long as they are priced accordingly: no more than $200 for 1TB, $300 for 2TB, and $400 for 4TB if/when those kinds of capacities emerge and price drops occur hopefully in a couple/few years from now.
 
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First reviews/previews are appearing as the NDA is lifted today.

This Dutch site notes the reason the release date got pushed back is because reviewers everywhere were experiencing strange performance issues wich turned out to be related to the drive overheating and "throttling down".
Samsung postponed the release and have been releasing beta-drivers to reviewers in the meanwhile to improve performance. So apparently they don't even have final drivers yet.

Ugh I guess I'll wait a bit to see what happens before deciding on samsung vs intel.
 
"When Samsung announced the 950 PRO, several of you commented on potential thermal throttling due to heat generated in such a small package during heavy use. The following image represents a worst case scenario, with the 950 PRO being sequentially written with zero airflow across it:

950%20PRO%20worst%20case%20throttle.png


As you can see, you would have to write nearly 150GB at over 1.5GB/sec to get a 950 PRO to warm up enough to throttle, and when it does, the throttling is very minor, dropping to only 1.2GB/sec intermittently. The slightest airflow prevents this from happening at all, and even if there was zero airflow, the chances of maxing a 950 PRO out on writes for that long of a burst is extremely unlikely in even the most demanding consumer usage scenario."

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storag...-PCIe-SSD-Review/Thermal-Throttling-Conclusio


So in real world usage i dont think thermal throttling is much of an issue
 
"When Samsung announced the 950 PRO, several of you commented on potential thermal throttling due to heat generated in such a small package during heavy use. The following image represents a worst case scenario, with the 950 PRO being sequentially written with zero airflow across it:

950%20PRO%20worst%20case%20throttle.png


As you can see, you would have to write nearly 150GB at over 1.5GB/sec to get a 950 PRO to warm up enough to throttle, and when it does, the throttling is very minor, dropping to only 1.2GB/sec intermittently. The slightest airflow prevents this from happening at all, and even if there was zero airflow, the chances of maxing a 950 PRO out on writes for that long of a burst is extremely unlikely in even the most demanding consumer usage scenario."

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storag...-PCIe-SSD-Review/Thermal-Throttling-Conclusio


So in real world usage i dont think thermal throttling is much of an issue

Background AV/AM...those are killers.
 
So, Anand has their review up and it looks pretty awesome.

A little bit disappointed in that I JUST bought my Intel 750, but in truth the Samsung 950 wouldn't have been an option for me anyway, as unlike the 750 it doesn't come with a bootrom, so unless you have an official m.2 motherboard with bios support, there's no booting from it.
 
Right, and Tech Report still can't find a real-world non-workstation or non-server use case for these drives:

http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/4

Time to boot Windows plus load up four professional applications (visual studio, 4k video editor, spreadsheet, image editor) simultaneously is exactly the same speed between the 950 Pro, and ther 850 EVO. But enjoy wasting your money :D

Unless you're copying multiple gigabytes of data constantly, you'll never notice the difference between this and the 850 series.

EDIT: I think Anandtech gets to the bottom of why NVMe drives are disappointing: after all that command plus interface change up, they're only dropping the command latency by half (6us versus 2.8).

http://anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-review-256gb-512gb/2

This is compared to USB, which has a latency of 133us for USB 2, and a bit lower for USB 3. It's no wonder that USB 3.0 connected SSDs suck at 4k throughput, and have noticeably slower performance. AHCI, for all it's faults, is actually pretty well designed!
 
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Right, and Tech Report still can't find a real-world non-workstation or non-server use case for these drives:

http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/4

Time to boot Windows plus load up four professional applications (visual studio, 4k video editor, spreadsheet, image editor) simultaneously is exactly the same speed between the 950 Pro, and ther 850 EVO. But enjoy wasting your money :D

Unless you're copying multiple gigabytes of data constantly, you'll never notice the difference between this and the 850 series.

EDIT: I think Anandtech gets to the bottom of why NVMe drives are disappointing: after all that command plus interface change up, they're only dropping the command latency by half (6us versus 2.8).

http://anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-review-256gb-512gb/2

This is compared to USB, which has a latency of 133us for USB 2, and a bit lower for USB 3. It's no wonder that USB 3.0 connected SSDs suck at 4k throughput, and have noticeably slower performance. AHCI, for all it's faults, is actually pretty well designed!
Exactly my thoughts! The 950 Pro is a huge disappointment based on techreport's real-world data. The RoboBench shows big gains, but that's going between a RAM drive, and you won't be doing that. Even a fast USB3 flash drive is capped around 400MB. Only a hypothetical USB3.1 or Thunderbolt connection would exceed SATAIII.

Then of course boot/load times are all virtually identical. Even loading a 523MB image file in GIMP takes the same 8.5s across drives.

It seems like the MX200 is perhaps the drive to get. You can get 1TB for $330, and it probably has ~5x the realistic endurance as an EVO based on this (Intel and Micron are the same).

Years from now, will NVMe suddenly be better utilized due to better coding or something?
 
The RoboBench shows big gains, but that's going between a RAM drive, and you won't be doing that.

I actually do. Every time Windows boots, I load a 32GB disk image into a ramdisk.

I know your point though. These things ARE faster, but we have really reached the point of (severely) diminishing returns on the client side.
 
Yep. Tom's real world benches showed most improvements over an 850 in the <1 second range, and their best job was 12 seconds on a 360 second task. Sadly, latency was worse than the Intel 750 by a fair margin, which might actually show itself in real world tasks.

Still, NVMe + M.2 just clicks in my brain as "right." But not for 70 cents/gig.

It's time to just focus on making drives cheaper and/or bigger now. 2TB nvme m.2 drive for under $800 is much more compelling, even if it can't transfer 6PB/s in benchmarks or whatever.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041926018 said:
I actually do. Every time Windows boots, I load a 32GB disk image into a ramdisk.

I know your point though. These things ARE faster, but we have really reached the point of (severely) diminishing returns on the client side.
You got me there :D What does that 32GB RAM drive do for you? Given the negligible difference the 950 Pro buys, does the RAM drive buy much? And does it buy more than the added time it takes to write to it on boot up?

And if it's your C: drive, that means your desktop won't be as efficient as a temporary file location, since moving things from C: to another drive will be a copy rather than an instantaneous move.
 
You got me there :D What does that 32GB RAM drive do for you? Given the negligible difference the 950 Pro buys, does the RAM drive buy much? And does it buy more than the added time it takes to write to it on boot up?

And if it's your C: drive, that means your desktop won't be as efficient as a temporary file location, since moving things from C: to another drive will be a copy rather than an instantaneous move.

I did it as a hack because I just happened to have lots of ram left over from decomissioning my old server, and I was trying to see if I could get map loads to load faster in my favorite game.

So I symlinked my game folders and many dependencies for Red Orchestra 2 to the RAMdisk.

In Red Orchestra 2, all the good classes tend to go fast, and I was missing them, so I decided to see what I could do to speed things up. For what it's worth, I'm usually first in now, which wasn't the case when I was loading directly from my Samsung 850 pro. :p

Dataram's newest version of RAMDisk is actually very good, much improved over the old version years ago. It now keeps track of what blocks change in the RAMdisk, and writes them to nonvolatile storage in real time, as write through cache. That way you don't have corrupted RAMdisks because data sits in non-ECC RAM too long, and you also don't have a long write time at shutdown, writing an entire image (and using up your write cycles)

If you have a need for a RAMDisk I highly recommend Dataram's software.
 
Years from now, will NVMe suddenly be better utilized due to better coding or something?

I doubt it, we already have a massively-multithreaded I/O subsystem on Windows.

I think this is just a case of I/O being so fast that we can't tell the difference. A similar thing happened with memory speeds many years back.
 
well, guess I'm not buying these now. I guess this is why we should wait for reviews before we jump in.
 
my guess why those programs are not loading faster with these drives comes down to 2 possible options

latency
and
single thread


my hunch is the latter. I already know many of my programs don't load instantly because of single thread bottleneck but that is just my 2 cents
 
I wonder what the limiting factor is for most of those real-world benchmarks. CPU I guess?
 
So if apps can be coded to be loaded using all CPU cores, the SSD might start being a bottleneck? Will that happen?
 
I think it's good enough but they need to iterate quickly and get the random speeds up and the price down. I paid a hefty price for an 80GB X25 back in the day but that was a revolutionary leap, this is more of an evolutionary bump.
 
So if apps can be coded to be loaded using all CPU cores, the SSD might start being a bottleneck? Will that happen?

Honestly don't know. I just know when I watch a program load I see it fill a single core half the time it is loading :/ Browsers are great examples. Plop task manager on second screen and watch what happens when various programs open and you'll see a program use 13% of your HT quad core (a single core) and you will be like @%&@%&@%$ this could be opening instantly if this was programmed decently.

I think it's good enough but they need to iterate quickly and get the random speeds up and the price down. I paid a hefty price for an 80GB X25 back in the day but that was a revolutionary leap, this is more of an evolutionary bump.

very true and for people like me that have various scans and other things that get annoying these are great because scans of SSD or moving large data gets old fast especially when they go off side by side.

day to day use....not going to see anything major until XPoint and then you still have that single thread issue.
 
Honestly don't know. I just know when I watch a program load I see it fill a single core half the time it is loading :/ Browsers are great examples. Plop task manager on second screen and watch what happens when various programs open and you'll see a program use 13% of your HT quad core (a single core) and you will be like @%&@%&@%$ this could be opening instantly if this was programmed decently.

It is a misconception that multithreeading is viable for all CPU tasks if they are only programmed right.

There are a huge amount of tasks (possibly even a majority) for which it is physically impossible to code them so they use more than one thread, or if you do, it has little to no performance benefit.

Multithreeading simply a possibility for all code. It isn't even a possibility for most code.

There are some cases which can benefit from it. By and large, these mostly already do. There are going to be some exceptions, of course.
 
this is more of an evolutionary bump
Bump? More like a flat line. In the techreport, the MX200 beat the 950 Pro in exactly half of the timed tests! (technically 4/9, but 2 were Windows boot ups, so it's 4/8)
 
Looking at anandtech's review of the 950 Pro, why is it that in certain benchmarks the SM951 is faster? The random write performance seems mediocre compared to the SM951
 
It is available for preorder on Amazon as of right now! I got my 512 pre-ordered.
 
Looking at anandtech's review of the 950 Pro, why is it that in certain benchmarks the SM951 is faster? The random write performance seems mediocre compared to the SM951

not sure. One report showed huge issues with drivers. Win 10 the drive sucks balls ATM and in Win 7 it is pretty good expect in high queue depths Win 10 rocks. I expect most of those benchmarks to be useless down the road nce those drivers get better fixed....assuming they will be.
 
coreyb3 and officer921, so why are you buying this? The MX200 1TB performs identically, gives double the capacity, costs less, and is more reliable.
 
coreyb3 and officer921, so why are you buying this? The MX200 1TB performs identically, gives double the capacity, costs less, and is more reliable.

People are often drawn in by the allure of new technology, despite it's lack of benefit in real world benchmarks.

The draw of the synthetic benchmarks can be strong :p

Personally I got my 750 because I was curious to play around with PCIe SSD's, and because I do frequent large file transfers to RAMDisk, where there actually is a benefit :p

I knew intellectually that there would be little to no benefit anywhere else, and I was OK with that.
 
coreyb3 and officer921, so why are you buying this? The MX200 1TB performs identically, gives double the capacity, costs less, and is more reliable.

Because I want it and the money doesn't matter to me. And why build a new $4000 gaming rig and then put a last gen SSD in it when there is something new and shiny, even if it's only marginally better.
 
It is a moderately priced SSD that fits in my M.2 slot, and it matches my motherboard ;). I am hearing good things about it in reviews so far, I don't know why there is so much hate for this thing.
 
I own an 850 pro so not sure is no demand for 850 pro's.

Remember the amount of people with nvme compatible boards is only a tiny fraction of the market so sata ssd's will be here for quite a while.

The most interesting thing about the 950 pro for me is the much bigger endurance warranty over the 850 pro.
 
something new and shiny, even if it's only marginally better.
New and shiny, yes. Marginally better, no (unless copying to a RAM drive). In fact, moving a file from your desktop to a higher capacity drive will incur much worse performance than using a single 1TB drive and moving to a different folder. This makes the 950 Pro significantly worse than a 1TB 850 or MX200.

I am hearing good things about it in reviews so far, I don't know why there is so much hate for this thing.
Then the reviews you're reading use pointless benchmarks that have no relevance to reality. I'd like to sell you my USB drive that has custom software that produces amazing results in my custom benchmark tool; you can even leave the drive installed under normal PC use and it will do absolutely nothing for you. On sale now for $150.
 
I am hearing good things about it in reviews so far, I don't know why there is so much hate for this thing.

I think people read into the tea-leaves too much and were expecting 2500mb/s random speed or something, which in all honesty even if we had I'm not so sure if you'd even noticed. I think that's what we are all confused about until we get some more field tests.
 
Then the reviews you're reading use pointless benchmarks that have no relevance to reality. I'd like to sell you my USB drive that has custom software that produces amazing results in my custom benchmark tool; you can even leave the drive installed under normal PC use and it will do absolutely nothing for you. On sale now for $150.

Yeah, don't get me wrong. I went with a 750 knowing that it wouldn't have much real world benefit, but try to do the following when you read SSD reviews, especially for non-server applications.

1.) Just like with the [H] video card reviews, pay attention to real world results more than synthetic benchmarks (windows boot time, application benchmarks, file copy, etc.) You'll likely find little to no difference between high end SATA SSD's and PCIe SSD's here.

2.) If you do need to look at synthetic benchmarks, pay the most attention to QD1 and QD2 results. These are the ones that matter the most in non-server environments. QD4 might be interesting to for unusually high load circumstances, but is mostly ignorable. Anything above QD4 just ignore completely. Unless you are running a server hammering that drive with heavy database requests, or have a hundred drive images for an ESXi server, or something like that, you'll never have that kind of queue depth in non-benchmarking conditions on your desktop.

This is notable, because some of the places where the new PCIe drives show the biggest differences compared to high end SATA SSD's is in the high queue depth read and write speeds and IOPS, and these are exactly the tests that make no difference at all on the desktop.
 
Bought mine. MX200 that is :D. $319 shipped after tax. I had been holding out for the 950 Pro.
 
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Amazon claiming they will ship Thursday the 29th. I've got my 512gb order in.
 
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