inevitable 950 pro vs. intel 750 thread...

caycep

Weaksauce
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Jan 12, 2014
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So, it looks like these are the two "prosumer" level NVMe PCIe 3.0x4 drives out at least in the near future. Which one to get?

Published numbers for the 950 pro seems to indicate the 512mb module edges out the 750 in sequential read, write, IOP's, yada yada

BUT...the Intel drive will be available at 1.2 tb from the get go, and in a mini-ITX build, it will be in a 2.5 in form factor with heatsink; and that can be easily mounted near a fan, rather than in the m.2 slot on the back of the motherboards - props for more durability/less throttling or heat issues?

So, it seems like the decision is: practicality vs. speed...

Just some thoughts..
 
big pro of Samsung is the much better warranty. I am going Sammy for that single reason...plus cheaper
 
Published numbers for the 950 pro seems to indicate the 512mb module edges out the 750 in sequential read, write, IOP's, yada yada

Not in IOPS. Intel tuned the 750 firmware for higher IOPS specifically for client applications at the cost of lower sequential speeds.

Intel 750 400GB vs Samsung 950 Pro 512GB
Sequential Read 2200 MB/s vs 2500 MB/s
Sequential Write 900 MB/s vs 1500 MB/s
4K Random Read 430K IOPS vs 300K IOPS
4K Random Write 230K IOPS vs 110K IOPS
Endurance "70GB Writes per day for 5 years"=127TB vs 400TB
Price $389 vs $349
Also, the Samsung 950 Pro has AES-256 and TCG Opal 2.0 encryption while the Intel 750 has no encryption.

I think most would go for the Samsung 950 Pro over the Intel 750 unless IOPS was extremely mission-critical. Samsung will probably dominate briefly, but Intel's next move (Optane) is going to be a doozy.
 
Do the 950's have power loss protection? The 750's do.

Samsung only seems to talk about the PLP (power loss protection) on their DC (Data Center) models, the 845DC Pro and 845DC EVO. They don't talk about it on any of their other models, including the 950 Pro, so my interpretation is that they reserve it for their DC models. Corrections welcomed if I am wrong.
 
We've already reached the point where increased sequential and IOPs don't matter for 99% of desktop users or cannot be obtained under normal desktop usage patterns anyway.

Going from 80 µs to 20 µs latency was slightly perceivable in a desktop, IMHO.

I'd imagine you could tell a little if we could go from 20 µs to 5 µs latency, but that's not going to happen until we see improvements elsewhere or the device moved.

I think either would make most people :) ;)
 
Honestly, even for power users, two Sata SSDs in RAID are WAAAY faster than any single-user scenario can take advantage of.

The consumer/prosumer NVM-Express IOPS really come into their own when dealing with multi-user environments like heavy-usage home servers and huge iterative file modifications. Take for instance: I used to host a Minecraft server and the HDD gets thrashed like crazy. I only hosted a max of three or four people on the server at a time (just friends from work), so I made due with a 2TB platter drive short-stroked to a 100GB partition. I could imagine if you wanted to host a similar server only with a few hundred users, SATA SSDs in RAID would not cut it, and these NVM-Express drives would show a huge improvement.
 
Honestly, even for power users, two Sata SSDs in RAID are WAAAY faster than any single-user scenario can take advantage of.

The consumer/prosumer NVM-Express IOPS really come into their own when dealing with multi-user environments like heavy-usage home servers and huge iterative file modifications. Take for instance: I used to host a Minecraft server and the HDD gets thrashed like crazy. I only hosted a max of three or four people on the server at a time (just friends from work), so I made due with a 2TB platter drive short-stroked to a 100GB partition. I could imagine if you wanted to host a similar server only with a few hundred users, SATA SSDs in RAID would not cut it, and these NVM-Express drives would show a huge improvement.

Yes and no. There are still I/O-heavy workloads that single users (mostly professionals) encounter. Content creation is the obvious one, as our benchmarking here supports. Analytical workflows in science, medicine, or finance also separate the good drives from the bad.

Most people shouldn't really care about the cutting edge at this point, but in the last week, I've batch processed hundreds of gigs of MRI data, run substantial MySQL databases locally, and processed a number of videos. This sort of stuff goes much more quickly with an Intel 750 than any of the SATA (or SATA RAID on PCIe, like the OCZ RevoDrive 350) configurations I've tried.

Most of the major manufacturers have demonstrated NVMe solutions, so the next few months are going to get very interesting.
 
Would photoshop and lightroom photo and video editing benefit more from a high IOPS SSD? Well i guess i should say between the near double IOPS on the 750 vs the 950 pro, would i see a difference for photo and video editing?
 
I'd expect you to notice it in render times when working on big videos, certainly. It'll benefit you anytime you push out to the pagefile, which honestly is pretty likely in videos.
 
It will make a big difference in Photoshop if you're using large file sizes and complex effects. Just make sure you point your scratch disk to the right drive :) Photoshop is actually one of the more intense benchmarks we run, showing big performance differences between even the fastest drives.

The 750 is the fastest we've tested by a significant margin (so far- have not gotten a 950 Pro review sample yet).
 
While the warranty may be longer on the Sammy, apparently if you actually try to reach a person and USE that warranty things get far more dicey.
However I'm more a fan of SATA (wish SATA Express had been used in SSD's) due to the more robust recovery technologies available for it. It's great to be super fast (nvme) but when things break, you want to be able to get back to rights with a minimum of hassle. But that's just me.
 
I'm for Intel, since I can't abide Samsung's terrible firmware reputation.
 
I've had two Samsung SSD's fail on me in 12 months. Not so sure about them anymore. Their CS is pretty quick at replacing the drives which is nice.
 
No way Samsung could have a better warrenty than Intel.
Intel has the best warrenty I have ever seen

yea if you plan on only using your SSD with light usage. What is the point of a 1100 dollar SSD with 219 TBW? That is like 1-3 years of usage depending on your work level.

Filling a 750 once equals .5-1% of warranty poofed

Let me get the fastest SSD in the world and only write 70GBs per day -_-
 
Not in IOPS. Intel tuned the 750 firmware for higher IOPS specifically for client applications at the cost of lower sequential speeds.

Intel 750 400GB vs Samsung 950 Pro 512GB
Sequential Read 2200 MB/s vs 2500 MB/s
Sequential Write 900 MB/s vs 1500 MB/s
4K Random Read 430K IOPS vs 300K IOPS
4K Random Write 230K IOPS vs 110K IOPS
Endurance "70GB Writes per day for 5 years"=127TB vs 400TB
Price $389 vs $349
Also, the Samsung 950 Pro has AES-256 and TCG Opal 2.0 encryption while the Intel 750 has no encryption.

I think most would go for the Samsung 950 Pro over the Intel 750 unless IOPS was extremely mission-critical. Samsung will probably dominate briefly, but Intel's next move (Optane) is going to be a doozy.

The intel is definitely better for regular desktop usage since it has the higher random read/write numbers. Good stuff there
 
Not in IOPS. Intel tuned the 750 firmware for higher IOPS specifically for client applications at the cost of lower sequential speeds.

Intel 750 400GB vs Samsung 950 Pro 512GB
Sequential Read 2200 MB/s vs 2500 MB/s
Sequential Write 900 MB/s vs 1500 MB/s
4K Random Read 430K IOPS vs 300K IOPS
4K Random Write 230K IOPS vs 110K IOPS
Endurance "70GB Writes per day for 5 years"=127TB vs 400TB
Price $389 vs $349
Also, the Samsung 950 Pro has AES-256 and TCG Opal 2.0 encryption while the Intel 750 has no encryption.

I think most would go for the Samsung 950 Pro over the Intel 750 unless IOPS was extremely mission-critical. Samsung will probably dominate briefly, but Intel's next move (Optane) is going to be a doozy.

Well, look at the Queue Depths.

The Intel 750 performs surprisingly poorly (relatively speaking of course, still better than any SATA drive) at low queue depths, and low queue depths are really all that matters for client workloads.

Unless you are putting it in a server, or have very unusual loads on your drive in your rig, it is safe to disregard any figures over QD4, and probably any over QD2 as well.

If you limit your comparison to just these lower queue depths, even the Kingston HyperX Predator beats the 750, and thus SHOULD be faster for client loads.

The high queue depth figures are usually touted as marketing figures, because that is where you get the biggest numbers, but they really don't do much for users. that's why these fast PCIe drives usually ahve high bench figures, but feel just about the same speed when used in your desktop.

If you have a high activity database on it, or tons of disk images for virtual machines on it, or something else that drives up the queue depth, then that is great, but even among those of us on these forums who are enthusiasts this is not the typical workload on our rigs.

If you want faster boot times, program load times, and game level load times, focus on QD1, QD2 and maybe QD4, and disregard everything else.

The Intel 750 benches excellent numbers at high Queue Depths, due to it being based on Intel's server SSD's, the P3700, designed for servers and optimized for high queue depths, because that is what matters for that market. If you look at the lower queue depths, the 750 falls rather rapidly, which is disappointing. I wish I had noticed this before buying mine.
 
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check the other thread. 2 guys posted 2 reviews already and the thing looks freakin sweet.
 
What can I do if my motherboard doesn't have a M.2 port connector thing? I thought it would plug in using PCI port but not sure with how these things look I seen them laying flat on the newer better motherboards.
 
What can I do if my motherboard doesn't have a M.2 port connector thing? I thought it would plug in using PCI port but not sure with how these things look I seen them laying flat on the newer better motherboards.

You can get a third party PCI express adapter card, but chances are you will not be able to boot from it unless it is new enough to have an m.2 slot.

There are some newer motherboards that share their BIOS basics with other models that have m.2 slots, and on these it might be able to boot, but your milage may vary. Only way to know for sure would be to buy the hardware and test, and prepare to be disappointed.

If all you want to do is use it as a secondary drive without booting, it should work though.

On older motherboards without M.2 slots it is better to go with the Intel 750, as it comes with a built in Boot ROM, and should boot on most newer UEFI compatible systems (UEFI 2.3.1 or newer)

You may need to contact your motherbnoard manufacturer to see if your BIOS is compatible, and they might be cagey if you ask them directly about it. Better to ask about UEFI revision.

If you have NVMe booting support in Bios (like m.2 boards do) you'll be fine to boot from the Samsung 950. If you have no m.2 slot but at least UEFI 2.3.1 you'll be fine to boot from the Intel 750.

In either case, it is not straight forward to transfer your existing install over to them though, unless it is already installed in UEFI mode.

My Intel 750 drive boots fine on my x79 based Asus p9x79 WS motherboard for fresh installs, but I am still struggling through trying to transfer my non-UEFI Windows install, which I ahve an ongoing thread about here.

So beware: If you get either of these on an older motherboard, you might not be able to boot off of the drive at all, and if you can, you might have to do a fresh install of the OS (or at least this would be infinitely easier)
 
I'll soon be doing this, going from a Samsung SSD 830 (SATA) to the Samsung 950 Pro on a Asus M7I board, although on Windows 10.

I'm guessing I'd best install the NVMe driver from Samsung first, connect the 950 Pro, boot Windows via the SSD 830, duplicate it on the M.2, boot from the M.2, repair Windows and hope for the best.
 
Everything Samsung I bought failed. Everything Samsung I see with people around me fails way too soon. To me, the entire company seems to be building stuff that is build to minimize failures before the warranty runs out, everything else be damned.

That's why this question is an easy one; Intel!
 
Everything Samsung I bought failed. Everything Samsung I see with people around me fails way too soon. To me, the entire company seems to be building stuff that is build to minimize failures before the warranty runs out, everything else be damned.

That's why this question is an easy one; Intel!

That is interesting, as Samsung is one of my more trusted brands.

I had a number of OCZ drives and they all had problems, but Samsung has been nothing but flawless for me across 10-12 drives. That being said, I only buy the Pro drives, none of that EVO nonsense.
 
Everything Samsung I bought failed. Everything Samsung I see with people around me fails way too soon. To me, the entire company seems to be building stuff that is build to minimize failures before the warranty runs out, everything else be damned.

That's why this question is an easy one; Intel!

Haven't had any issues with the 830, 850 Pro, and 850 Evo i've owned and use (to this day).

I am not sure why people look at one model out of the 840 series and automatically throw the entire Samsung product line family out into the dump.
 
I don't think jcv was talking about Samsung SSDs but Samsung products in general. Too bad, they make excellent SSDs, regardless of their other products.
 
Samsung is a chaebol and is not really one company, but a gigantic mess of subsidiaries. So far, it seems their semiconductor group is great. Everything else, hit or miss depending on model year...
 
And that's why smart consumers don't look at "brands" but "products" ;)

See the amazing product that is the "950 Pro", not the crappy company that is "Samsung".
 
And that's why smart consumers don't look at "brands" but "products" ;)

See the amazing product that is the "950 Pro", not the crappy company that is "Samsung".

So you're saying they got the TRIM command to work correctly, this time?
 
Check back? Thanks for the update! Seems curious that not ever SSD vendor had problems with the kernel bug.
 
You can get a third party PCI express adapter card, but chances are you will not be able to boot from it unless it is new enough to have an m.2 slot.

There are some newer motherboards that share their BIOS basics with other models that have m.2 slots, and on these it might be able to boot, but your milage may vary. Only way to know for sure would be to buy the hardware and test, and prepare to be disappointed.

If all you want to do is use it as a secondary drive without booting, it should work though.

On older motherboards without M.2 slots it is better to go with the Intel 750, as it comes with a built in Boot ROM, and should boot on most newer UEFI compatible systems (UEFI 2.3.1 or newer)

You may need to contact your motherbnoard manufacturer to see if your BIOS is compatible, and they might be cagey if you ask them directly about it. Better to ask about UEFI revision.

If you have NVMe booting support in Bios (like m.2 boards do) you'll be fine to boot from the Samsung 950. If you have no m.2 slot but at least UEFI 2.3.1 you'll be fine to boot from the Intel 750.

In either case, it is not straight forward to transfer your existing install over to them though, unless it is already installed in UEFI mode.

My Intel 750 drive boots fine on my x79 based Asus p9x79 WS motherboard for fresh installs, but I am still struggling through trying to transfer my non-UEFI Windows install, which I ahve an ongoing thread about here.

So beware: If you get either of these on an older motherboard, you might not be able to boot off of the drive at all, and if you can, you might have to do a fresh install of the OS (or at least this would be infinitely easier)


Sorry for digging up an old post.

I am also using a P9X79 WS motherboard and since it has 2 PCIE 3.0 x4 slots, I thought NVMe drives like Intel 750 would be great.

So my question is : Do your Intel 750 drive works on PCIE 3.0 speed ? or PCIE 2.0 ?

With PCIE 3.0 in action, Intel 750 is able to unleash its full power by surpassing 2GBps throughput limitation of PCIE 2.0 x4.

Thanks in advance !
 
Sorry for digging up an old post.

I am also using a P9X79 WS motherboard and since it has 2 PCIE 3.0 x4 slots, I thought NVMe drives like Intel 750 would be great.

So my question is : Do your Intel 750 drive works on PCIE 3.0 speed ? or PCIE 2.0 ?

With PCIE 3.0 in action, Intel 750 is able to unleash its full power by surpassing 2GBps throughput limitation of PCIE 2.0 x4.

Thanks in advance !

No worries, asking people about their setups and sharing their opinions is - IMHO - why forums like these exist, and now with the new forums that notify us if we get quoted, it's actually easier to notice when it happens! :)

So here's the deal. Yes, the 750 uses full PCIe 3.0 4x on my motherboard. You just have to make sure you have "gen3" enabled in the BIOS. Once you do this, it will work just as well and as fast in your p9x79 as it will in any newer board.

That being said, it won't make a huge difference.

These new PCIe SSD's all have very high and impressive sounding specs, but the truth is regardless of which one you choose, be it the Samsung 950, or the Intel 750 or something else, the circumstances under which you'll actually see their max speeds are very very rare, and usually limited to intense server-type workloads (think databases, multiple virtualized operating systems on the same disk, etc. etc. that drive up the Queue Depth pretty high.

You will likely not even see the max throughput values even in a disk benchmark like Crystal Disk Mark or anything like that. They will likely post throughput numbers higher than a high end SATA SSD disk, but nowhere near the max specs, and in real life use you will barely tell the difference, if at all. Your system won't boot faster, your games/applications/levels won't load any quicker, you might transfer/copy large files slightly faster, but it will be marginal.

PCIe / M.2 SSD's are really what amount to dyno queens. They look great on paper, but in real terms, especially in desktop workloads, they'll perform about the same as a high end SATA SSD, like a Samsung 850 Pro.

I knew all this before buying my 750, but I needed an SSD size bump anyway, and I still had to try it for myself, the temptation was too strong. I justified it with the fact that I often run multiple virtual machines on my desktop at the same time, and it might help. It's a good SSD, but if someone where to break into my system and swap it with an SATA based Samsung 850 pro and not tell me, I probably wouldn't notice.

This isn't because of the P9x79, this is the way it is on ALL systems, even the newest high end boards. It doesn't matter if it's the Intel 750 via PCIe or the Samsung 950 via m.2.

Also, you will be giving some things up if you go this route. For instance, with the 750 installed, you will no longer have a disk activity LED on the front of your case. It doesn't work. If you are attached to looking at this light to see fi the computer is actually doing something, you may want to consider another alternative :p it bugged the hell out of me at first, but I got over it.

So I guess my take is, if you get a good deal on one, they are great SSD's, and they will work just as well on your P9x79 as they will on newer systems, just don't expect to be instantly getting over 2GB/s throughput. Unless you are doing high queue depth work loads, this just isn't going to happen.

If you don't get a good deal on one, I'd just get a good SATA SSD, and save the money for some other part that will make more of a practical difference. PCIe/M.2 SSD's just aren't practically significant as it stands today. They are more show-off item,s for people who want the latest tech, than they are actual performance boosters at this point.
 
Say what you will, I have two links of 10Gig-E between my desktop and ESX box... 950 pro and fusion-io in my desktop and dual ioDrives in my ESX server... I can push over 2GB/sec both directions =)
 
Say what you will, I have two links of 10Gig-E between my desktop and ESX box... 950 pro and fusion-io in my desktop and dual ioDrives in my ESX server... I can push over 2GB/sec both directions =)

Hmm. Been a while since I've read up on these things, maybe I am remembering wrong. I remember doing Crystaldiskmarks on my 750 when I first got it, and being a little disappointed, and then doing a Crystaldiskmark directly on a RAM disk (quad channel DDR3-1866) and finding that they gave me pretty similar results. I assumed it was either a benchmark problem, or just the state of things maxing out disk transactions.

I remember reading a few editorials - however - that came to the same conclusion, one on Anandtech, if I recall, and one on here at the [H] by the new SSD guy that started a while back (I think, just cant remember) that actual real world performance didn't differ much - if at all - between the new fancy PCIe / M.2 models and older high end SATA models.

I'd be curious about your setup. I've struggled to get high transfers to my server with a similar direct 10gig link. I have a Brocade BR1020 on each side, with transducers and fiber from The Fiber Store. I'm guessing the brocade adapter is just not that great. Even in iperf I never get more than about 3Gbit over it, which really kind of stinks when compared to the 10Gig spec, but I've been OK with that, since it's 3x faster than my alternative, gigabit copper...

Are you getting those 2GB + speeds in single file transfers, or with multiple transfers going at the same time, and adding them up? I can get higher speeds when I do the latter, but for single transfers, I always get kind of disappointing results.
 
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Sorry for digging up an old post.

I am also using a P9X79 WS motherboard and since it has 2 PCIE 3.0 x4 slots, I thought NVMe drives like Intel 750 would be great.

So my question is : Do your Intel 750 drive works on PCIE 3.0 speed ? or PCIE 2.0 ?

With PCIE 3.0 in action, Intel 750 is able to unleash its full power by surpassing 2GBps throughput limitation of PCIE 2.0 x4.

Thanks in advance !

You don't mention what processor you're using, with X79 you need to have an Ivy Bridge E and not a Sandy Bridge E to have PCIe 3.0 support. Sandy only had PCIe 2.0.
 
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