Samsung SSD 950 PRO M.2 Review: Affordable, Ultra Fast Storage

Name: Samsung SSD 950 PRO M.2
Brand: Samsung

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, October 22, 2015, 10:00 AM EDT

Next we ran SiSoft SANDRA 2014, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the File System test suite and provide the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run on fully formatted drives, with software RAID 0 configured on the DC P3608. Read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

SiSoft SANDRA 2015 SP3

Synthetic Disk Benchmarking

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The Samsung SSD 950 PRO M.2 performed right about on par with the Intel SSD 750 series drive in the read portion of this benchmark, minus a few MB/s, but the Samsung drive put up better write scores here.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

More Information Here: http://bit.ly/btuV6w

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5KB through 64MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

atto1

atto2

The ATTO Disk Benchmark shows one of the Samsung SSD 950 PRO M.2's strengths. Although the Samsung drive put up slightly lower peak bandwidth scores, the SSD 950 PRO M.2 offered significantly better read throughput with transfer sizes below 256K.

Tags: Samsung, SSD, Storage, nvme, m.2, vnand, 950 pro

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com