With the 950 Pro Samsung launches an NVMe-SSD for end users. The drive which is lying front of us in this case performs extremely well pumping out up to 2200 MB/s sequentially reading and 900 MB/s sequentially writing. This definitely makes us wonder how much of that horsepower is available in real life.

Specifications / Delivery

Model Samsung 950 Pro M.2 256 GB Samsung 950 Pro M.2 512 GB Samsung 950 Pro M.2 1 TB Capacity 256 GB 512 GB 1 TB Form Factor M.2 (2280) M.2 (2280) M.2 (2280) Interface PCIe 3.0 x4 PCIe 3.0 x4 PCIe 3.0 x4 Protocol NVMe NVMe NVMe Controller Samsung UBX

ARM 3-Core

500MHz

8 Channel Samsung UBX

ARM 3-Core

500MHz

8 Channel Samsung UBX

ARM 3-Core

500MHz

8 Channel Memory 3D V-NAND

32 layer 3D V-NAND

32 layer 3D V-NAND

48 layer DRAM 512 MB 512 MB n/a Throughput 2200 MB/s sequential read

900 MB/s sequential write

270’000 IOPS 4K random read

180’000 IOPS 4K random write 2500 MB/s sequential read

1500 MB/s sequential write

300’000 IOPS 4K random read

110’000 IOPS 4K random write 2500 MB/s sequential read

1500 MB/s sequential write

300’000 IOPS 4K random read

110’000 IOPS 4K random write Endurance 200 TBW 400 TBW 800 TBW Power Consumption 5.1 Watt active

1.7 Watt idle 5.1 Watt active

1.7 Watt idle n/a Warranty 5 Years 5 Years 5 Years Price

Samsung is amongst the first companies which launched an NVMe SSD for end users. NVMe or NVM Express stands for Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCI). These specs define how solid state drives are being accessed through the PCI Express bus and therefore directly communicate with the CPU. NVMe replaces AHCI in the case of SSDs and it brings quite a few advantages to the table. AHCI, or Advanced Host Controller Interface, was optimized for drives with low throughput and high latencies. Apart from that it could not deal with high parallelism, being limited to a queue depth of 32. NVMe on the other hand has been designed to leverage the benefits of SSD from ground up, which means it can deal perfectly with low latency and high throughput drives. Apart from that it supports another magnitude of parallelism, whereas the queue depth can reach up to 65536. Since SSDs are based on controllers, which usually feature between eight and ten channels, parallelism is a key factor in gaining more performance.

Having a closer look at the specs we see that Samsung claims the 256GB 950 Pro M.2 can reach up to 2200/900MB/s sequential read/write speeds, which is simply a new level when it comes to the desktop market. Apparently this kind of performance in combination with a high-capacity drive doesn’t result in a bargain, which is why for instance the 512GB drive will set you back 319 Euro. Nevertheless, for this kind of money you really do get a drive, which outperforms almost anything available on the market to date and also offers a good amount of capacity.

A closer look at this M.2 expansion card shows, Samsung is using their 3 core ARM controller in the UBX version as well as second generation V-NAND memory. Therefore 32 layers of NAND flash memory are being stacked, which allows for 128Gbit of density. Per memory chip this translates into 128GB of capacity. At the moment Samsung is building 256GB as well as 512GB models. At a later stage, when the vendor switches to 48 layer V-NAND a 1 Terabyte drive is going to be available as well.