I have to hand it to Samsung - this thing is smoking fast (compared to a single SSD), it was simple to configure, and for this class of NVMe drive it's about the most GBs/$. It does feel good to put money into something that is so far advanced compared to the previous SSD technology.
I've been waiting for delivery of this item for two weeks to complete my new SkyLake build. The i7-6700k is so fast I really needed something more than the (2) Samsung 830 SSD Raid0 configuration I had left over from my old rig. Based on the synthetic and real benchmarks I have run, the 950 Pro is 2.5x faster read and almost 5x faster write speed compared to my old Raid0 SSD setup.
For my new build I went with Windows 10 (which btw looks like total crap compared to Windows 7 Aero Glass). I originally experimented using NVLite to update a Windows 7 SP1 ISO with NVMe drivers, but in the end I decided to go with Win 10, because it has NVMe support built-in and to avoid potential UEFI problems and Secure Boot limitations. Incidentally, I found a great utility called “DoNotSpy10” that eliminates all the new Microsoft spyware, including the key-logger, that’s built into Windows 10. Otherwise, I’m running on a new Asus Deluxe motherboard with the Intel Z170 chipset. The 950 Pro configured in the BIOS as SATA Express (not M.2) with the CSM set to UEFI only for boot device. According to the benchmarks I’m getting, the NVMe is utilizing the proper 4 PCIe lanes.
The new Skylake build (using the 950 Pro 512GB and 32 GBs of Corsair 3200 MHz DDR4) is pretty fast, but not as fast as I expected compared to the 8 year old Q6600 system it replaced. According to Mores Law Skylake should be 2^4x = 16x faster. But as far as I can tell it’s only about 4x faster. Not all that impressive considering eight years of development.
The 950 Pro is tiny - slightly larger than a stick of gum, with memory chips populated on one side only. It gets pretty hot when running CrystalDiskMark (about 150-deg F maybe), but with no thermal throttling that I've seen so far.
Before I ordered the 950 Pro I experimented with the PCIe version of the Intel 750 400GB NVMe, which I later returned (for some reason it interfered with my NVIDIA card). Before the 950 Pro came out, the Intel 750 was the fastest thing out there. But significantly, the 950 Pro, with its 32-layer 3D V-NAND technology, has about a 50% faster continuous write speed than the Intel. I think I'm much happier with the 950 Pro - it's cheaper, faster, smaller, cooler and 'cooler'!
Update: Samsung’s website says they, “…will be producing a proprietary driver for improved performance”, compared to the native Windows driver. So it’s possible we’ll see a little more speed out of this already very fast SSD.
| Hard Drive | 512 GB Nvme |
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