Posted October 22, 2015 Sources: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-review-256gb-512gb http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/950-pro-review-samsungs-first-pcie-m-2-nvme-ssd-is-an-absolute-monster/ http://hothardware.com/reviews/samsung-ssd-950-pro-m2-review-affordable-ultra-fast-storage http://www.trustedreviews.com/samsung-950-pro-m-2-256mb-and-512mb-ssd-review The spiritual successor to the sm951(which had become a phenomena in the SSD space with both it's extreme speeds/value and it's controversial thermal issues) was announced quite a while ago by Samsung, but little information had come out since the announcment even though it had/has a slated Oct '15 release date. The wait appears to be nearly over my friends as the 950 Pro is apparently to hit shelves very shortly with the NDA for the product having just been lifted this morning. The reviews are in, and this thing is a beast! EDIT: By this official Amazon Listing for the 256GB version, the release date will be October 29th. http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-950-256GB-PCIe-NVMe/dp/B01639696U/ref=sr_1_16?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1445546759&sr=1-16&keywords=Samsung+SSD Thermal throttling does not appear to be significant enough in any of Anandtech's "real world-like" test benches take the 950 Pro out of the top spot on each suite, but certain tests indicate thermal throttling in specific applications is a large factor once again. Comparing the graphs of the two 950s shows that the inconsistency of the 512GB drive comes from frequent jumps in performance above a solid baseline. This pattern holds even for the test with overprovisioning. Graphing the power consumption over time (not shown) reveals that the periods of lower performance have lower power. If the lower performance were due to periodic background garbage collection, then we would expect power consumption to be at least as high as when the drive is performing well. Instead, it appears that the 512GB drive is experiencing thermal throttling. Indeed due to other specific thermal throttling behaviors, it is Anandtech's opinion that the CONTROLLER of the PCIe drive, not the 3D-NAND, is experiencing throttling, a perhaps daunting issue for Samsung to remedy. The sequential read performance is probably the best showcase of what the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface can do. The 256GB 950 Pro attains over half of the link speed, but the 512GB is again bogged down by something—relatively speaking, since it's still more than twice the speed of SATA and faster than even the Intel SSD 750. It's possible that the 950 Pro isn't faithfully implementing the secure form of the NVMe format command and some lingering fragmentation is preventing the 512GB drive from performing as specified. Read operations require less power to be supplied to the flash chip than for writes, but if the thermal throttling is all in the controller it could be showing up here as well. Overall, they note that even taking into account the rather significant thermal throttling concerns (in particular applications), the drive is nothing short of Class Leading. Testing of the 950 Pro revealed some curiosities. Nevetheless, even when showing symptoms of possible thermal throttling, the 512GB sustained respectable performance and in tests that were representative of interactive use it performed extremely well. Users waiting on a full range of Skylake systems to come to the market may need a PCIe to M.2 adapter in order to put the drive in a slot that provides four lanes at PCIe 3.0 speed, but with the added benefit that such adapters can be bought with heatsinks to reduce the chance of triggering thermal throttling. ----------------------------------------------------- Other notes... -This drive consumes a fairly high amount of power, even at idle, and is showing buggy support for idle power reduction techniques at this time. -Pricing is as follows from hothardware.com Samsung has set the MSRPs for the 256GB and 512GB SSD 950 PRO M.2 drives at $199 and $349, respectively, which works out to $.77 and $.68 per gigabyte. -Official performance and hard spec list below: LINK-> Kurald Galain: The Night Eternal Top 5820k, 980ti SLI Build in the World* CPU: i7-5820k // GPU: SLI MSI 980ti Gaming 6G // Cooling: Full Custom WC // Mobo: ASUS X99 Sabertooth // Ram: 32GB Crucial Ballistic Sport // Boot SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 500GB Mass SSD: Crucial M500 960GB // PSU: EVGA Supernova 850G2 // Case: Fractal Design Define S Windowed // OS: Windows 10 // Mouse: Razer Naga Chroma // Keyboard: Corsair k70 Cherry MX Reds Headset: Senn RS185 // Monitor: ASUS PG348Q // Devices: Note 10+ - Surface Book 2 15" LINK-> Ainulindale: Music of the Ainur Prosumer DYI FreeNAS CPU: Xeon E3-1231v3 // Cooling: Noctua L9x65 // Mobo: AsRock E3C224D2I // Ram: 16GB Kingston ECC DDR3-1333 HDDs: 4x HGST Deskstar NAS 3TB // PSU: EVGA 650GQ // Case: Fractal Design Node 304 // OS: FreeNAS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... 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