Samsung 950 PRO M.2 SSD review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

It is seriously staggering to see where we are headed in terms of performance for NAND based flash storage units. For motherboards the industry will need to move to SATA4 rapidly with a serious increase in broad specced bandwidth to be able to keep up with M.2 and NVMe. As you have been able to see, the Samsung 950 Pro is a product that offers tremendously fast performance in both reads and writes relative to what you pay for it. At close to 1 GB/s writes per seconds it is still twice as fast as any SATA3, while topping 2 GB/s reads and thus quadrupling that number compared to a SATA3 SSD.

The new 950 PRO M.2 SSDs are overall enormously fast and combined with a 5 year warranty and guaranteed with strong endurance numbers you should be good to go for a long time. Starting with the 256 GB version the endurance of this SSD is rated at 200 TB for its lifetime, that's rather massive. I mean, if you write say 20 GB a day / 365 days a year that would be 7.3 TB per year. So that's over 25 years of lifespan easily. For the 512 GB model that number is even doubled up to 400 TB written, that my fellow gurus is server grade classification.

Performance

Overall these new 950 PRO storage units shine at many factors and on all levels really, IOPS performance is very good. This SSD writes and reads serious amounts of tiny files in a very fast fashion. We stated it before though, IOPS is not something you as a consumer should worry about too much unless you are doing a lot of database related work or create similar workloads on your PC, but this SSD certainly ranks high within this aspect. Trace testing - we think by far the best test in our entire benchmark suite is PCMark Vantage 64-bit. This is a trace test and can emulate what you guys do on your PC but then multiplied by a factor of 100, this test puts more focus on read performance opposed to writing though. The outcome of the results with the Samsung 950 PRO is nuts, exceptionally good. Sustained read / write performance, again excellent albeit a little lower than advertised. Read performance in particular leads and is top ranking. Overall the series is impressive. Zoom in at both IOPS and trace performance and you'll notice that the SSD can manage serious workloads without breaking so much as a drop of sweat. So whether you write lots of small files, copy big MKV movies or do it all together, the 950 PRO remains a top dog on all fronts.

Overall NAND Storage Usage

Any SSD is enjoyable, very much so. If you put a drive like this into your compatible PC, you'll have no idea what is about to hit you. We very much enjoy the grand sustained performance of this SSD series; if you copy a vast amount of compressed data, then the 950 PRO will perform seriously fast in performance. Make no mistake, replacing a HDD with an SSD in your PC eliminates the random access lag of the HDD head, it is no longer mechanical. That combined with the performance SATA3 / M.2 / mSATA offers these days is simply a massive difference and probably the best upgrade you can make for your computer anno 2015.

Pricing & Warranty

Making your own SSD with your own controller, own PCB, own cache chips and own NAND flash memory does have advantages as Samsung is able to keep the prices very competitive as this product is made 99% in-house.

• 256 GB costs 199 EUR = 0.78 EURO per GB
• 512 GB costs 369 EUR = 0.72 EURO per GB

These are prices incl. VAT and based on street prices I found here in the Netherlands. The 512GB is very hard to find at the time of writing this article though. For the USA this is 199 USD and 349 USD respectively for the 256GB  and 512GB models. That's a bit of a high-end price for an enthusiast class performing M.2 SSD with excellent endurance, you'll receive a five year carry-in warranty with this drive, which we feel is very comfortable alongside the 200 TB and 400 TB written respectively.

Concluding

It is very hard not to be impressed by what Samsung offers with the 950 PRO. Aside from the OEM and enterprise solutions out there the 950 PRO is incredibly impressive for the money. You will quadruple your read performance over a regular SATA3 SSD. For writes that is double to triple the performance of today's SATA3 solutions. I am a little skeptical about write performance versus heat though, we measure 75 Degrees C at the controller during stress and we know that it has active thermal throttling. It is definitely something to monitor for the future. But yeah, I am still a little shocked as to what we just tested, it is rare to see NAND storage this fast at consumer grade level. The 950 PRO as such is a product done right and man, is it impressive. There are some requirements for proper M.2 usage though. You do need to use the right combination of OS/UEFI motherboard and CPU, we do recommend X79/X99 and Z87/Z97/Z170 here. Check with your motherboard manufacturers if the board can support M.2 with four PCI-Express lanes (Gen 3.0) and NVMe. Almost all of the above mentioned motherboards will do that after a firmware update. For Z87 however some might be stuck with just one PCIe 3.0 x1 link. Such users can still use this SSD, but would get stuck at ~ 1 GB/sec performance on reads. We do expect that people considering buying this product surely will have the right hardware already, right? Hey, it's the enthusiast crowd, the true gurus! You will receive a five year carry-in warranty with this product that is rated at 200 TB written (400 TB for the 512 MB model). Whatever you are planning with this storage unit, you are good to go from gaming, overall net pc usage (albeit overkill) to video transcoding and editing and content creation, this is by far one of the fastest SSD series available for I/O intensive workloads, consumer grade that is. If you purchase the product, don't forget to install the NVMe driver from the Samsung website. Last words: Overall the Samsung 950 PRO M.2 SSD reaches new levels in the NAND flash SSD storage arena. It deserves our top pick award as it is exactly that.

If your motherboard supports it, it's highly recommended. 

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