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The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review
- Keyframe 11y ago2+ GBps storage that doesn't require its own desk space and power supply and RAID card! Exciting times for us in film and video. Now all we need is more space and a price drop! ~4TB would be enough for 2k mastering. 16TB for 4k.
- mtgx 11y ago16TB SSD is coming from Samsung next year: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-unveils-2-5-inch-16tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-unveils-2-5-i...
- Keyframe 11y agoCan't wait! Time for dotHill-like performance to trickle down to affordable range. Last two things then are affordable 10-bit monitors and gfx cards with 10-bit output and alternative to infiniband.
- DiabloD3 11y agoWhats wrong with Infiniband? Cost is typically less than dealing with Ethernet NICs that can do RoCE. Intel is also moving ahead with their Infiniband implementation as the "supercomputing" cross-chassis bus (QPI is a clone of Hypertransport, but Intel decided not to use it for supercomputing bus fabrics like AMD does with their externally switched Hypertransport implementation), so future Xeons and future Phis will have on-die True Scale controllers.
- Keyframe 11y agoNothing's wrong with infiniband, of course! Except for prices compared to average SoHo network infrastructure. Video mastering and editing networks usually aren't large. You need a fast SAN with fast network and up you go. Everything around it is so expensive though. In recent years there have been a massive price drop in fast storage, fast graphics cards and now we wait for cheap fast networks and 10-bit through and through.
- DiabloD3 11y agoExactly how fast are we talking? Dual 10gbit nics are now often for $150 + cost of optical modules or DACs.
- Keyframe 11y agoWe're talking mastering here. For editing it doesn't matter since it can and is done in proxies. Depending on the bit-depth and fps we're talking anywhere between ~127 MBps to ~253MBps (1+ - 2+ Gbps) per workstation. Usually there are several and a one heavy NAS or several smaller ones. That's for 2K (and HD - but then it's a bit smaller bandwidth). For 4K it's four times that.
- scurvy 11y agoCabling I'd suspect. The copper cables are thick, the fiber QSFPs are expensive.
- DiabloD3 11y agoThe fiber QSFP modules are the same ones used for Ethernet, ergo, 40gbit Ethernet and 56gbit Infiniband are going to have the same issue with QSFP modules being expensive.
- rasz_pl 11y ago20+ GBps
- scurvy 11y agoThere are companies out there shipping NVMe SSD's in much larger capacities. Novachips is one that we've started testing with, and so far the performance is great. Their 4TB models are around $1/gb mark; the higher capacity models are much lower $/gb. So far we've only tested the 2.5" models and haven't had a chance to play with the 8/16TB PCIe add-in cards.
- gambiting 11y agoWait, I don't understand something. 950 Pro is meant to be the flagship, right? So how come, that Samsung SM951 is much much cheaper, yet just as fast, or even faster in every metric? The only thing that is slower, is the read speed(2150MB/s vs 2200MB/s). Better write speed, more IOPS, and cheaper.....so how is the 950 Pro a flagship? SM951: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-samsung-sm951-m2-(22x80)-pcie-30-(x4)-nvme-ssd-mlc-nand-read-2150mb-s-write-1260mb-s-300k-100k http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-samsung-sm951-m2-(22x80... 950 Pro: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-samsung-950-pro-m2-(22x80)-pcie-30-(x4)-nvme-11-ssd-ubx-vnand-read-2200mb-s-write-900mb-s-270k http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-samsung-950-pro-m2-(22x...
- Rafert 11y agoThe SM951 is an OEM product, but it does have better specs.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- emn13 11y agoI'm not sure what other people were expecting, but I'm pretty disappointed by these performance numbers. I does great in the "destroyer" benchmark, but that's the exception. Steady state random write perf is actually lower than the sata 850 pro! In other words, if your workload isn't super heavy, this is quite fast - but then, why the heck are you buying this expensive, low capacity power hog if your workload is almost certainly fast enough on a slower drive? At the very least, this drive should be beating or equaling samsung's own SATA drives reliably - but it's not. The power consumption is also worrying, especially due to the tiny form factor...
- alextgordon 11y agoI can't think of a situation in which I would care about write bandwidth. Write latency is important for databases. Read bandwidth is of critical importance for everything. But write bandwidth? What's it for?
- 11y ago
- pella 11y agofor Linux users : -> upgrade to a NVMe capable linux kernel "NVM Express: Linux driver support decoded" (2015.06.30) https://communities.intel.com/community/itpeernetwork/blog/2015/06/09/nvm-express-linux-driver-support-decoded https://communities.intel.com/community/itpeernetwork/blog/2...
- rasz_pl 11y agoEndurance 400TB = 800 cycles per NAND cell
- pella 11y ago>Endurance 400TB = 800 cycles per NAND cell Why not 8000 ? The 850 pro has a 6000 "NAND P/E Cycles"[1] ( P/E = program/erase cycles ) and rated at 300TB ( 512Gb model ) [1] http://www.anandtech.com/print/8239/update-on-samsung-850-pro-endurance-vnand-die-size http://www.anandtech.com/print/8239/update-on-samsung-850-pr...
- rasz_pl 11y agodoesnt matter as long as you have this hard warranty limit
- Symmetry 11y agoProbably a bit less than that depending on how over-provisioned the drive is. But it's not like you'll be able to write 700 times to the same cell deliberately and that value is only the worst case guarantee. If you followed Anandtech's destructive testing most drives last way longer than they're rated for under normal conditions.
- TimMeade 11y agoInteresting. Are these meant to be consumer only? I didn't really see anything about data center applications? We run 24 850 pros in raid configuration as base SAN. I wonder what these would spec out in a configuration like that. Is there a PCIe card that can hold several?
- ruraljuror 11y agoHave you already checked out the Intel 750 series? They are more expensive (the 1.2TB is $0.87 per GB vs $0.69 for the 512GB of the 950 PRO), but I think suitable for an application such as yours. Here are some benchmarks: http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/3 http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd...
- TimMeade 11y agoYes we looked at them, but just too expensive for the large arrays we build. The 850's have been working well, but ever in the search for better.
- erdewit 11y agoKeep in mind that these 950 SSDs get very hot when continuously reading or writing since there is around 6W of heat dissipation on a tiny uncooled board. What happens then is that the thermal throttling will kick in and degrade the performance.
- walshemj 11y agothe Idea seems is you boot off the 4x m.2 and have both a ssd and then one or more big sata 2-4 TB drives
- walshemj 11y agoThis is the consumer spin on the existing enterprise product is how I saw this.
- scurvy 11y ago
- shasheene 11y agoIt seems pretty clear that PCIe-based solid-state drives using the NVMe protocol (and U.2 or M.2 connectors) will have much higher performance than AHCI/SATA over the next 5+ years (for both latency and throughput). Since coreboot (with TianoCore or SeaBIOS) and the impressive nouveau and radeon projects, there's fewer places binary blobs can hide on a modern computing system. One of the bigger exceptions is the drive controllers (which processes AHCI/NVMe messages and things like wear levelling). Besides restrict freedom and performance experimentation, it's also a security issue, given the scope for man-in-the-middle attacks [1] Now at the start of NVMe's reign, it's probably an especially good time to start a project to make an open-source replacement to the proprietary firmware blobs of SSDs/flash memory! :) [1] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554
- Keyframe 11y agoConsidering next 5 years, it will be interesting to see what will happen once Intel 3D Xpoint comes to market.
- ris 11y agoPerhaps nothing. The closer you look the less you see with xpoint. Interesting article: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-micron-3d-xpoint-updates,review-33326.html http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-micron-3d-xpoint-updates...
- Keyframe 11y agoInteresting article indeed. I wasn't aware of the politics and rivalry with Samsung behind it. I was kind of rooting for near-future RAM and disks becoming one. Looks like, instead, we will get Rambus v2 story.
- walterbell 11y agoDon't forget Intel SGX, which arrives with Skylake over the next few months, https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/3nn33x/intel_to_begin_shipping_skylake_cpus_with_sgx/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/3nn33x/intel_to_b...?
- listic 11y agoPower draw is very high for some reason :/
- jseliger 11y agoThis may be a stupid question, but will the 950 Pro PCIe go into a late-2013 and up Retina Macbook Pro? I ask because I looked into a larger capacity hard drive for my rMBP, and I found this: http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz/hard-lesson-learned-new-release-apple-products-containing-lesser-performing-sandisk-128gb-ssds/ http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz/hard-less... and various other pieces saying that commercial PCIe drives weren't available.
- calinet6 11y agoLiterally the only question I wanted answered anywhere... can't find it.
- sfilipov 11y agoProbably not. AFAIK the MBPs with PCIe SSDs use a proprietary connector. This SSD uses the standard one. It should not be physically possible to fit one inside the MBP.
- wmf 11y agoNo. Apple uses a nonstandard connector and even OWC doesn't have SSDs for late 2013.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- replete 11y agoGod damn it, still no 1TB model.
- BorisMelnik 11y agoFor desktop it seems as though the last part that is holding up a major change in form factor design is the video card. While everything else gets smaller, these seem to get bigger and bigger (more fans, more RAM, etc) Really exciting to see changes like these come. I can't wait to start adopting these into my PC builds. I might just try one for a new HTPC I am building (OS drive).
- lsc 11y agoI only found out about NVMe a few months ago, mostly because I've been focusing on the dayjob, but I am really excited about the technology. for a long time, there wasn't anything but proprietary shit drivers for pcie-ssd and if you did get your hands on some pci-e flash, without the proprietary driver, at best, you'd get a MTD. MTDs are way less useful, if you want to run a filesystem other than jffs2, and mtdblk, from what I read, is kinda shit. But NVMe solves all those problems, as far as I can tell. (I haven't bought any yet, but will shortly.) SuperMicro is selling chassis that have a mix of NVMe and regular sata ports in form factors similar to the traditional 2.5" sata hot swap bays, which is awesome... in my application, at least, it's not acceptable to have to unrack and take apart a server when a drive fails, so without that part (without chassis that have externally accessible hot-swap bays for NVMe) it's pretty much a no-go. But all the pieces are here. I just need to get together the cash (see aformentioned dayjob) and then figure out what I've gotta buy quality wise. (the samsung pros are on the list, and of course, the nicer Intel stuff) - SSDs really are quite different from spinning disk in many ways; especially backups without zfs. just doing a snapshot and full dd-image of a fast ssd like this would probably be acceptable once a day; something I wouldn't dream of with spinning disk. For some background, I've fallen way behind my competition, and I'm still entirely spinning disk while most of them are entirely ssd. I'm most of the way to matching them on ram/disk per dollar at this point (not on the front page, but most of my customers are upgraded and the rest will be done soonish) but even then, I'm on spinning disk and they are on ssd.
- mschuster91 11y ago> MTDs are way less useful, if you want to run a filesystem other than jffs2, and mtdblk, from what I read, is kinda shit. UBIfs seems to solve that pretty well for me.
- lsc 11y agothanks. the successor to jffs2. as you can see, I haven't looked into this for a while (thus not knowing about NVMe until very recently) so I don't think it existed or was stable then.
- 11y ago