Samsung SM951-NVMe RAID Review

[Guest]

The Samsung 950 Pro is available now and it's a hot seller, but the SM951-NVMe still packs a better value for shoppers looking to save. Today, we look at three Samsung PCIe solutions in both single-drive and RAID 0 configurations.

Samsung SM951-NVMe RAID Review : Read more

 

[CaedenV]

Conclusion: Putting this in your gaming PC is a waste of money... but having this RAID setup in a WSUS or SQL Server for a school or medium sized business would make things fly at unbelievable speeds!

Man I can't wait to have NVMe capabilities, but the real world performance advantage is not that great compared to my current setup. Hopefully in a few years when truly fast DDR4 gets cheap, and we have truly 4K capable single-GPU solutions that don't cost $500+ then it will be time to do a massive overhaul.

 

[abbadon_34]

Conclusion: Putting this in your gaming PC is a waste of money... but having this RAID setup in a WSUS or SQL Server for a school or medium sized business would make things fly at unbelievable speeds!

Man I can't wait to have NVMe capabilities, but the real world performance advantage is not that great compared to my current setup. Hopefully in a few years when truly fast DDR4 gets cheap, and we have truly 4K capable single-GPU solutions that don't cost $500+ then it will be time to do a massive overhaul.

/me drools at the thought

 

[Non-Euclidean]

So I wasted my money. Sue me.

What I want to know is did Samsung finally manage to put the label on right side up? From the second page of the article it looks like they did. About time.

The Random Steady State graph is mislabeled. It should be "This is your brain on NVMe"

And the conclusion is a bit off also. The 950 Pro is going for 326 at NewEgg and has been in that ballpark for a while.

 

[xenol]

Conclusion: Putting this in your gaming PC is a waste of money... but having this RAID setup in a WSUS or SQL Server for a school or medium sized business would make things fly at unbelievable speeds!

Man I can't wait to have NVMe capabilities, but the real world performance advantage is not that great compared to my current setup. Hopefully in a few years when truly fast DDR4 gets cheap, and we have truly 4K capable single-GPU solutions that don't cost $500+ then it will be time to do a massive overhaul.

Unless those inquiries are huge, I'm not even sure about that. The AHCI access time isn't too far off from NVMe in RAID.

Access time is what kills these kinds of things.

 

[2Be_or_Not2Be]

RAID-5 isn't the only path to fault tolerance; RAID-1 (simple mirroring) also gives you fault-tolerance with only two drives. Of course, capacity is only the size of 1 drive.

It can give you a bit higher read performance, too, though mainly at higher queue depths.

 

[dgingeri]

How is the SM951 a better deal? On Amazon, the SM951 is $10-25 more expensive, depending on capacity. I don't see how this is "better value."

 

[CRamseyer]

At the time of writing the SM951-NVMe 512GB was lower than the 950 Pro. I still show the 512GB model with a lower price but the gap is much less now.

 

[dgingeri]

I'm showing the 512GB 950 pro at $327 on Amazon as the lowest price I could find. I found the 512GB SM951 for $325. That's not much discount considering the warranty coverage and durability.

 

[firefoxx04]

Please use better graphs..

 

[zodiacfml]

Thanks for the real world tests and graphs.

 

[kiniku]

Knowing me I would have gone out and eventually bought one of these to replace my 840 Pro thinking I'd get ludicrous speeds.

Thank you for this article!

 

[exileut]

The Samsung 950 Pro 512GB is $297.49 + $5-$6 shipping on Microcenter.

 

[mapesdhs]

RAID-5 isn't the only path to fault tolerance; RAID-1 (simple mirroring) also gives you fault-tolerance with only two drives. Of course, capacity is only the size of 1 drive.

The other option is RAID10, ie. a RAID1 mirror of two RAID0 sets. I've tried it with a P55 board, worked rather well, 4x SATA2 SSDs, gave over 800MB/sec which was pretty good back then.

 

[dgingeri]

RAID-5 isn't the only path to fault tolerance; RAID-1 (simple mirroring) also gives you fault-tolerance with only two drives. Of course, capacity is only the size of 1 drive.

The other option is RAID10, ie. a RAID1 mirror of two RAID0 sets. I've tried it with a P55 board, worked rather well, 4x SATA2 SSDs, gave over 800MB/sec which was pretty good back then.

I have 6 4TB drives on a Dell PERC H710 controller for my storage. I had a choice on how to set it up. I could do RAID5, with one drive worth of parity data, but reliability is a bit low when a drive fails. I could do RAID6, with two drives worth of parity, but the write penalty is pretty harsh. I settled on RAID10, with a capacity of only 11.3TB. It's fast, 800MB/s fast, and the write penalty isn't very harsh, but it does reduce the available storage by quite a bit.

 

[mapesdhs]

I have 6 4TB drives on a Dell PERC H710 controller for my storage. ...

Yup, the usual tradeoffs and choices. I tested a Dell PERC 6bit controller way back with some SSDs, it had a 512MB cache RAM, managed to get more than 2GB/sec which was pretty neat.