

Interestingly, Samsung didn’t compare performance of the 950 Pro with the SM951, but on paper there’s a bit of give and take going on. Hopefully, that should mean better prices and wider availability, though we don’t have internal performance numbers just yet.

Nvme pm951 nvme samsu full#
Samsung just briefed us on their upcoming 950 Pro SSD, which will be a retail product with full NVMe support. There’s a lot to like with the Samsung SM951, but even with great performance, it may not be the M.2 drive to get. That sort of defeats the purpose of buying an NVMe M.2 device, which is probably why Samsung is positioning the drive as an OEM-only product. The catch is that you still need a laptop BIOS that supports booting from an NVMe drive otherwise, the SM951 will only work as secondary storage. This is the intended market for the SM951, and not only does it offer great performance, but it does it in an M.2 form factor that you can find in most modern laptops. Here’s what the charts won’t tell you: The Intel SSD 750 is basically useless for laptops and notebooks. Somewhat interesting is that even on an x2 Gen2 PCIe connection, the SM951 is still generally faster than SATA SSDs, including RAID 0 SATA drives, but there’s clearly a bottleneck. The same is true of file copying, where Samsung enjoys a moderate lead. The PCMark 8 Storage Score, of course, reflects system-wide performance, so the SSD has less of an impact and most of the drives are “tied,” but Samsung is clearly delivering better bandwidth. The QD64 AS SSD Random Write results are the one area where Intel still holds a significant advantage, but that’s a pretty unlikely use case for consumers.Īs we continue through the benchmarks, IOmeter confirms the AS SSD results, but an interesting thing happens when we get to the “real world”: Samsung wins out in both the file copy test and PCMark 8 Storage. the 512GB Samsung, things would likely be much closer-and you’d get 112GB of additional storage from Samsung. The Intel 1.2TB drive is faster, but if we had the 400GB Intel vs. Basically, very few people are going to have a board with SFF-8643, so there’s not much demand for those drives.Ĭonsidering the relatively low capacity, the SM951 does well in our sequential and random transfer results.

Intel offers the drive in a 2.5-inch form factor as well, though it requires relatively rare SFF-8643 (Serial Attached SCSI) connector. There are other potential concerns, though, like the need for an x4 PCIe 3.0 slot to realize maximum performance, and a motherboard that has BIOS support for NVMe. The biggest issue is price: The smallest version is 400GB and costs just under $400, while the larger 800GB and 1.2TB models double and triple the capacity and price. Intel’s SSD 750 is awesome, but there are a few limitations. If you’re just interested in what this means to the end user, NVMe has much higher bandwidth and some optimizations to reduce latency and improve throughput. The core differences between NVMe and AHCI are that NVMe has significantly more queues and supports more commands per queue (65536 queues and commands per queue, compared to one queue with up to 32 commands), it has more interrupt options, and there’s significantly improved parallelism for the interface and devices.

NVMe connects to storage via a PCI Express interface, opting to use the existing standard rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is a new standard designed specifically around the needs of SSDs, where previous SSDs used the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) command set that was built for SATA drives-which initially consisted solely of hard drives and other slow storage options.
