Review: Samsung 950 PRO M.2 256GB SSD - 2500 MB/sec under 200 USD

#5190982 Posted on: 11/18/2015 01:31 AM

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My prior über workstation was the Z9PED8 WS and unfortunately it can't do NVMe or m.2 with 4x lanes,

Now Im running a Z10PE-D8 WS

for compatibility and speed the xp941 is very fast and as is the sm951

in order of speed (high to higher) it's xp941, sm951 ahci, sm951 nvme, 950pro nvme.

in order of heat generated (warm to warmer) it's xp941, 950pro nvme, sm951 name, sm951 ahci

I describe the heat from the drives as warm. Under load all chips are less than 49c on all models.
Having 4 titan x sc right above them may increase the environment heat, but its still with normal parameters.

If you look closely at the picture you'll see that I have heatsinks on many motherboard components as well.

There was a company this summer that did a review of the z10 and took a thermal image of the board, so when I saw the review I used the picture as guide to get rid of hot spots

in addition the 950pro only has chips on the top surface which aids in cooling and allows for all those little aluminum heatsinks.


The hottest thing on the whole board now is the chipset controller the c612, and that runs about 104F to about 109F and that sits directly under 2.5 out of 4 video cards.

I can't imagine the drives on motherboard being a heat issue, maybe, but I don't know it might be a heat issue in a tight enclosed environment like a surface or tablet laptop


All temps are so farrrr below spec I'm not concerned





here is a link to my full 36 core 72 HT pc
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=403963

#5191049 Posted on: 11/18/2015 07:54 AM

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Best benchmark app, overall?

Below are my results: Samsung 850, mSATA, 1 terabyte drive.
Not really a fair result, because I did it in the middle of the day's work, web browsing. Just turned off the background tasks, and ran the test.

Hardware DELL XPS-15, L521-X, 16 GB DDR3. Nvidia 640m. Terabyte SSD +Terabyte HDD, which might be replaced with a multi-terabyte 2.5 inch SSD, to increase speeds, save battery life, heat production and noise.

Used the 64bit version, not the 32 bit. Also the latest version. Does this matter?
With so many benchtest apps, which is the best for the home user, web-browsing, home-backups, etc?

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CrystalDiskMark 5.0.3 x64 (C) 2007-2015 hiyohiyo
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* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 284.515 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 271.009 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 210.775 MB/s
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 195.024 MB/s
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 274.142 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 264.220 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 36.974 MB/s
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 73.344 MB/s

Test : 1024 MiB (x5)
Date : 2015/11/18 16:20:23
OS : Windows 10 (x64)

#5191228 Posted on: 11/18/2015 02:40 PM

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Is the 950 compatible with Asus Maximus Hero VII guys?? Does it use its maximum speed or there is a hold-back from the mobo's side? I just want to use as a data drive.. unrar, installing games, loading games as fast it can and things like that. As a bootable drive I use my 850 PRO. Thanks!

#5191316 Posted on: 11/18/2015 04:57 PM

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Excellent. I was going to comment that it appeared to me from the Magician screen shot posted that you had turned rapid mode off--very good. I have an 850 EVO, 8 gigs system ram installed, and when I enable rapid mode under Win10x64 my non-paged ram pool jumps from ~200mbs to 1.2GBs. (If I had 16GBs or more installed, I wonder if it would reserve an even larger cache...!) So of course I keep rapid mode turned off as it is likely to hurt more than help, especially in systems of 8GBs or less.

Yes, you're right...excellent performance for this drive! Especially for the size...! Thanks for the review!

#5191365 Posted on: 11/18/2015 05:59 PM

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Would not be slim. Now what you could do, is kind of make shift a heat spreader from a memory module maybe.

950 Sata III needs to come now! Got an i5 4690 and more memory for my Alpha, just waiting on the 950 to be released in Sata III!