Samsung 950 pro review (ssd m.2 nvme pcie)

Samsung, Leading manufacturer of memory and SSD drives recently released its new Samsung 950 Pro solid drive with M.2 NVMe PCIe interface with various capacities available. In our test bench we have had the 512 GB version. Don't miss our review!

After trying to contact Samsung to send us the product and not receive a response from the brand. Not for this reason, we want to share our analysis of this product that promises a lot.

Technical characteristics Samsung 950 Pro

Samsung 950 Pro

Samsung shows us a suitable presentation for the Samsung 950 Pro, with a well protected box and a brochure with basic technical and warranty information, which in this particular model is 5 years. The back contains the usual marketing, informing us that it is a disk with V-NAND memory and following the NVMe specification.

The form factor of the Samsung 950 Pro is elegant, with black PCBs and a relatively small format (2280), which makes it an excellent disk for mounting on laptops that have this interface. Consumption follows the line of other NVMe drives, with much lower values ​​than any mechanical, although somewhat high compared to other modern SATA SSDs. Specifically, we are talking about 6W under load.

The disc has the most advanced components that Samsung has. Highlights include the UBX controller (an ARM Cortex-R4 processor with 3 cores, 8 channels running at 500mhz, which we have already seen on other Samsung M.2 drives), 512MB of LPDDR3 RAM and 32-layer V-NAND memory. Thanks to these impressive specifications it is a very fast disk, with 1.5GB / s read speed, 2.5GB / s write, and more than 110K / 300K IOPS write / read in ideal conditions.

We will have to install the NVMe driver that Samsung provides for your Samsung 950 Pro model, since the one that includes Windows 8 / 8.1 by default only provides basic functionality, and even the performance of the disk suffers quite a bit, in addition to that we probably cannot update the firmware and review the rest of the parameters with the SSD software, which we will talk about next.

software

The software in charge of supporting and updating the firmware of the Samsung 950 Pro is again the Samsung Magician, quite well known and reputed. The current version supports the entire 950 series and allows us to see all the relevant parameters, in addition to checking performance and activating RAPID mode (using RAM as cache). The automatic optimization function for the OS is not yet supported, but since it is an NVMe disk, the most relevant settings are already correct as soon as the driver is installed.

Test and performance equipment

TESTING BENCH
Processor:	Intel i7-5820K
Base plate:	Asus Rampage V Extreme X99.
Memory:	16 GB DDR4 G.Skills Ripjaws V.
Heatsink	Custom liquid cooling.
HDD	Samsung 950 Pro 512 GB.
Graphic card	Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti
Power supply	EVGA 750W G2

For testing we will use the native controller of the X99 chipset on a high performance board: Asus X99 Rampage V Extreme. Our tests will be performed with the following performance software.

• Crystal Disk Mark. AS SSD Benchmark 1.7.4 ATTO Disk Benchmark

There has been a lot of speculation about these temperature problems, concluding that in realistic use, no matter how much we install and move data, they will not occur. In addition, even in the worst state, we continue at speeds above twice what the best SATA3 disks can give. For the most demanding users, we are starting to see adapters for M.2 disks with their own heatsink, but we do not see it as necessary.

Final words and conclusion

On many occasions, especially in the SSDs market, it is difficult to make a decision, since there are many alternatives, all of them very similar to each other in performance and price, in many cases practically assembling the same components. If they do not, many times improving one aspect implies making another one worse, since each controller has its peculiarities and to top it all they are limited by the SATA3 interface, which begins to be a serious limitation for the sequential speeds of a modern SSD.

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In this case, the decision is much clearer: the Samsung 950 Pro is the fastest SSD available to the consumer market without question. Also, despite the fact that we note its high price as a downside, we see that it is still much more affordable than one of its main competitors, the Intel 750, also with an M.2 and NVMe interface, so it has won practically all fronts.

What is the catch then? That when we are dealing with disks as fast as the SATA SSD that we have today, it is difficult to notice improvement, even if the results in benchmarks improve. Thus, we have barely gained 1 second of boot time compared to the Samsung 850 EVO that we had previously in the test team. It is difficult to justify paying more than double for each GB of storage when we are rarely going to notice it in real use. If there is an inexpensive version with TLC memory, a "950 EVO", it is probably a much more succulent option. Until then, only for enthusiasts who want the best.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ PERFORMANCE AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL ALLOWED BY CURRENT TECHNOLOGY	- HIGH PRICE IN FRONT OF SATA SSD. LOW COMPARED WITH INTEL 750.
+ FACTOR OF FORM THAT DOES NOT OCCUPY SPACE IN LAPTOPES OR IN THE TOWER	- POSSIBLE THROTLING FOR TEMPERATURE ON EXTREMELY DEMANDING LOADS
+ 5 YEARS WARRANTY
+ RELIABILITY AND PERFORMANCE CONSISTENCY

The Professional Review team awards him the platinum medal:

Samsung 950 Pro

Components

performance

Price

Warranty

9.3 / 10

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