Samsung SM951 128GB And 256GB SSD Review

[Arabian Knight]

Hello,

Can you please test the SSD in Raid 0 ?

you can use PCIE slots converters for this . and use 2 cards and software raid.

 

[Arabian Knight]

On a Z97 platform the M.2 slot is wired to the Z97 chipset that uses two of the available eight PCI Express 2.0 lanes available from the Z97 chipset itself and has nothing to do with the sixteen PCI Express 3.0 lanes wired to the CPU socket that are dedicated to the graphics card(s) slots.

Generally that's true. The exception is the ASRock Z97 Extreme6 / Extreme9 which has an 'Ultra M.2' socket with 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes wired directly to the CPU.

Where did you see that? So that´s 12 lanes for video and 4 lanes for the ultra m.2 socket?

there are no 12 lanes slots.

the slots are

16 , 8 , 4 , 2, 1

so if the motherboard uses 4 lanes for the M2 the PCIe 16x will switch into 8x mode if using 16 lanes CPU .

The only other way is to use a PLX switch .

 

[logainofhades]

I believe the Extreme9 does have a PLX switch, as it supports SLI beyond 2x.

 

[Daniel Ladishew]

I would love to see Tomshardware do a robust round-up and review of PCIe M.2 adapter cards. Now that these SSD are arriving for the masses to purchase, it would be nice to know which are the best options for integrating them into builds that don't have m.2 sockets native.

 

[CRamseyer]

The thing with m.2 adapter cards is they lack logic circuits. The PCIe lanes just go straight to the drive. Some of them add capacitors for a little more stability when it comes to power, some don't.

My favorite adapter is the Bplus M.2 PCIe SSD to PCIe 3.0 x4 adapter:

https://www.ramcity.com.au/buy/bplus-m.2-pcie-ssd-to-pcie-2.0-x4-adapter/M2P4A

The XP941 can get hot while benchmarking so I picked up a couple of those. The SM951 doesn't get as hot under load so you don't really need the heatsink. That doesn't mean the Next-Big-Thing SSD won't need a heatsink. I would rather plan ahead now and not buy a second later.

The price is high on that one though. You can buy heatsinks off EBay is any number of designs that will fit the PCIe slot requirements. I would be a lot cheaper to just buy the lowest priced m.2 PCIe x4 adapter and stick a heatsink on with double sided thermal tape.

 

[TechyInAZ]

Wow that's one fast SSD!! Amazing that SSD's are now reaching speeds of RAMdisks!

I was considering saving up for the HyperX Predator, but now that NvMe is coming out, I guess ill wait lol.

 

[Tedbullpit]

Just an update for those who are interested, Lenovo has released a Firmware update for their SM951 (BXW24L0Q) current version is BXW22L0Q, specs for the 512GB are basically identical to the Samsung SM951 now.

 

[bpbarrette]

I think it´s no good using it with a Z97 platform, since there are only 16 pcie lanes available, so these ssds may split to 8x for both, which is the case of the Impact vii. Go for X99.

On a Z97 platform the M.2 slot is wired to the Z97 chipset that uses two of the available eight PCI Express 2.0 lanes available from the Z97 chipset itself and has nothing to do with the sixteen PCI Express 3.0 lanes wired to the CPU socket that are dedicated to the graphics card(s) slots.

http://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/MAXIMUS_VII_IMPACT/specifications/
Go to the end where you can read "notes". Understand now?

The ASUS page says: "Intel® Z97 Express chipset with M.2 (PCI Express 3.0 x4) support". What does this mean in terms of overall performance when there's a GTX 970/980 used and an M.2 used? I'm wondering if the GTX card takes any real hit.

 

[RedJaron]

The ASUS page says: "Intel® Z97 Express chipset with M.2 (PCI Express 3.0 x4) support". What does this mean in terms of overall performance when there's a GTX 970/980 used and an M.2 used? I'm wondering if the GTX card takes any real hit.

It completely depends on the motherboard and how it wants to split the lanes. Since we're talking Z97, any PCIe 3.0 lanes come off the CPU. So yes, in order to use four 3.0 lanes on M.2, your GPU would only have eight and the other four would either be wasted or redirected elsewhere. PCIe 3.0 x8 won't bottleneck any current GPU, and likely nothing released over the next few years. Technically, Z97 itself has eight PCIe 2.0 lanes, which have the same bandwidth of 3.0 x4 for the M.2. So theoretically you could get the same performance if the entire chipset was dedicated to the M.2 drive.

 

[Arabian Knight]

Wow that's one fast SSD!! Amazing that SSD's are now reaching speeds of RAMdisks!

I was considering saving up for the HyperX Predator, but now that NvMe is coming out, I guess ill wait lol.

nope !

SSD are not even 1/10 the speed of Ram disks ..

you are looking at Sequential speed only. the true speed in RAM disks are the Random ones and I/O speed which is 10 times faster than SSD.

example

 

[Blueberries]

Wow that's one fast SSD!! Amazing that SSD's are now reaching speeds of RAMdisks!

I was considering saving up for the HyperX Predator, but now that NvMe is coming out, I guess ill wait lol.

nope !

SSD are not even 1/10 the speed of Ram disks ..

you are looking at Sequential speed only. the true speed in RAM disks are the Random ones and I/O speed which is 10 times faster than SSD.
...

SSDs can go much faster than that. For example this setup is capable of 3,906mb/s 4k Reads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9UsqJ_o5wQ

Besides, Ram disks are useless. They're unstable and you can't install your OS on it.

 

[bpbarrette]

The ASUS page says: "Intel® Z97 Express chipset with M.2 (PCI Express 3.0 x4) support". What does this mean in terms of overall performance when there's a GTX 970/980 used and an M.2 used? I'm wondering if the GTX card takes any real hit.

It completely depends on the motherboard and how it wants to split the lanes. Since we're talking Z97, any PCIe 3.0 lanes come off the CPU. So yes, in order to use four 3.0 lanes on M.2, your GPU would only have eight and the other four would either be wasted or redirected elsewhere. PCIe 3.0 x8 won't bottleneck any current GPU, and likely nothing released over the next few years. Technically, Z97 itself has eight PCIe 2.0 lanes, which have the same bandwidth of 3.0 x4 for the M.2. So theoretically you could get the same performance if the entire chipset was dedicated to the M.2 drive.

Thanks for the reply!

 

[Arabian Knight]

Wow that's one fast SSD!! Amazing that SSD's are now reaching speeds of RAMdisks!

I was considering saving up for the HyperX Predator, but now that NvMe is coming out, I guess ill wait lol.

nope !

SSD are not even 1/10 the speed of Ram disks ..

you are looking at Sequential speed only. the true speed in RAM disks are the Random ones and I/O speed which is 10 times faster than SSD.
...

SSDs can go much faster than that. For example this setup is capable of 3,906mb/s 4k Reads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9UsqJ_o5wQ

Besides, Ram disks are useless. They're unstable and you can't install your OS on it.

that drive you posted has only 100K IOPS

Ram disks are 800K IOPS and can be more depending on Ram used .

your Card is nothing but 16 SSD in Raid .. nothing MORE ! this will not increase IOPS

 

[Blueberries]

[
that drive you posted has only 100K IOPS

Ram disks are 800K IOPS and can be more depending on Ram used .

your Card is nothing but 16 SSD in Raid .. nothing MORE ! this will not increase IOPS

OCZ rated it for 1,000,000 4k IOPS, and that's besides the point as other enterprise options can do 800k (See: Samsung's SM1715, or Intel's Fultondale 3700s)

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/news-events/press-releases/detail?newsId=13701

 

[Arabian Knight]

[
that drive you posted has only 100K IOPS

Ram disks are 800K IOPS and can be more depending on Ram used .

your Card is nothing but 16 SSD in Raid .. nothing MORE ! this will not increase IOPS

OCZ rated it for 1,000,000 4k IOPS, and that's besides the point as other enterprise options can do 800k (See: Samsung's SM1715, or Intel's Fultondale 3700s)

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/news-events/press-releases/detail?newsId=13701

nope . the OCZ we talked about wis only 100K IOPS.

and I am talking about READ and WRITE IOPS.

the Samsung you gave me is only 130K IOPS.

Please do more research when talking.

RAM Disks are the same speed READ AND WRITE .

The problem in SSD is WRITING speed and this is not a secret.

 

[Blueberries]

[
that drive you posted has only 100K IOPS

Ram disks are 800K IOPS and can be more depending on Ram used .

your Card is nothing but 16 SSD in Raid .. nothing MORE ! this will not increase IOPS

OCZ rated it for 1,000,000 4k IOPS, and that's besides the point as other enterprise options can do 800k (See: Samsung's SM1715, or Intel's Fultondale 3700s)

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/news-events/press-releases/detail?newsId=13701

nope . the OCZ we talked about wis only 100K IOPS.

and I am talking about READ and WRITE IOPS.

the Samsung you gave me is only 130K IOPS.

Please do more research when talking.

RAM Disks are the same speed READ AND WRITE .

The problem in SSD is WRITING speed and this is not a secret.

As per your Crystal Disk Mark picture above:

4kb Random:
1484MB/s Read, 1031MB/s Write

Translated to IOPS that's:

379,904 Reads
263,936 Writes

Which is substantially slower than enterprise options available today, and those aren't even real numbers. If the benchmark included the automatic write-caching the drives do they would be much higher.

You're watching a different video than me if you think two OCZ-ZDrives in RAID using x16 PCI-express lanes was only doing 100k 4k IOPS, lol. 13 GB/s is 3.5 million 4k IOPS sequentially. That was 100k 128kb IOPS.

 

[Arabian Knight]

[
that drive you posted has only 100K IOPS

Ram disks are 800K IOPS and can be more depending on Ram used .

your Card is nothing but 16 SSD in Raid .. nothing MORE ! this will not increase IOPS

OCZ rated it for 1,000,000 4k IOPS, and that's besides the point as other enterprise options can do 800k (See: Samsung's SM1715, or Intel's Fultondale 3700s)

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/news-events/press-releases/detail?newsId=13701

nope . the OCZ we talked about wis only 100K IOPS.

and I am talking about READ and WRITE IOPS.

the Samsung you gave me is only 130K IOPS.

Please do more research when talking.

RAM Disks are the same speed READ AND WRITE .

The problem in SSD is WRITING speed and this is not a secret.

As per your Crystal Disk Mark picture above:

4kb Random:
1484MB/s Read, 1031MB/s Write

Translated to IOPS that's:

379,904 Reads
263,936 Writes

Which is substantially slower than enterprise options available today, and those aren't even real numbers. If the benchmark included the automatic write-caching the drives do they would be much higher.

You're watching a different video than me if you think two OCZ-ZDrives in RAID using x16 PCI-express lanes was only doing 100k 4k IOPS, lol. 13 GB/s is 3.5 million 4k IOPS sequentially. That was 100k 128kb IOPS.

you dont know what you are talking about .

Raid does not increase IOPS. FACT.

and remember raid cards USE 2G DDR3 Ram for caching , because they KNOW it is 10 times faster.

by the way , PCI express 16 lanes is nothing , Just 16 G/s Max .. the Quad channel bandwidth in Quad channel DDR4 is 68 GB/s (Haswell-e)

even normal dual channel DDR3 memory bandwidth is 25.6 GB/s example i7 4770K

have a nice day.

 

[Blueberries]

Well, use a Ram disk then if you can't see why an SSD is better. I can't help you.

 

[Arabian Knight]

Well, use a Ram disk then if you can't see why an SSD is better. I can't help you.

I dont need your help.

I am using RamDisks since the beginning of PC , even before windows was ever around. AND I am using Professional SSD at my work , and I know exactly the difference between them.

RAM disks are 10 times faster . and are used as a working drive . true they cant be used as storage . BUT saying SSD reached RAM disk speed is totally wrong. not even close.

have a nice day.