
The Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD Review - x0f1a
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-review-256gb-512gb
======
shasheene
It 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)

~~~
zokier
My personal preference as a solution for this "problem" would be to make the
drives dumb enough that the firmware wouldn't matter that much anymore.
Something like ONFI flash with UBIFS. Flash chips are not such unique
snowflakes that a generic software with some tweakable parameters could not
manage them.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Flash chips are not such unique snowflakes that a generic software with some
> tweakable parameters could not manage them.

Take a look at any of the recent reviews comparing drives with very similar
flash hardware, yet with _wildly_ different performance characteristics.
Firmware matters.

I'd certainly like to see such devices with Open Source firmware, but don't
discount the difficulty of the problem.

~~~
nitrogen
Also, we want to offload as much tedium as possible to secondary processors so
the CPU is fully dedicated to our workloads.

~~~
tracker1
The same was once said for modems and audio adapters...

------
gambiting
Wait, 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...](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)

950 Pro:

[http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-
samsung-950-pro-m2-(22x...](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)

~~~
cdr
Much much cheaper? What?

The 512GB 950 Pro is $349, 512GB SM951 is as much as $490 if you can manage to
find it. The 256GB SM951 is more available, but it's the same price as the 950
Pro at the very best.

And that's before you start to see sales on the 950 Pro, which you will
definitely see.

SM951 is an OEM product and you're generally hard pressed to find it available
as a consumer in any substantial quantity. The 950 Pro is a mass market
consumer product.

Just look at Amazon, Newegg, etc.

~~~
gambiting
I don't know, is there a problem with the links I posted? 256GB version is 50
pounds less, 512GB version is over 100 pounds less.

------
Keyframe
2+ 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
16TB SSD is coming from Samsung next year:

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-
unveils-2-5-i...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-
unveils-2-5-inch-16tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/)

~~~
Keyframe
Can'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
Whats 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
Nothing'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
Exactly how fast are we talking? Dual 10gbit nics are now often for $150 +
cost of optical modules or DACs.

~~~
Keyframe
We'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.

------
jseliger
This 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-less...](http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-
buzz/hard-lesson-learned-new-release-apple-products-containing-lesser-
performing-sandisk-128gb-ssds/) and various other pieces saying that
commercial PCIe drives weren't available.

~~~
sfilipov
Probably 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.

------
TimMeade
Interesting. 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?

~~~
erdewit
Keep 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
the 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

------
lsc
I 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
> 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
thanks. 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.

------
pella
for 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/2...](https://communities.intel.com/community/itpeernetwork/blog/2015/06/09/nvm-
express-linux-driver-support-decoded)

------
BorisMelnik
For 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).

------
listic
Power draw is very high for some reason :/

~~~
Sephr
Not when normalized with read/write speeds. I can personally confirm this by
scaling the PCIe bus speed of my own SM951 down to 2x lanes on 2.0 (which
limits the r/w to about 550MB/s).

------
rasz_pl
Endurance 400TB = 800 cycles per NAND cell

~~~
pella
>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-pr...](http://www.anandtech.com/print/8239/update-on-
samsung-850-pro-endurance-vnand-die-size)

~~~
rasz_pl
doesnt matter as long as you have this hard warranty limit

------
replete
God damn it, still no 1TB model.

