Why is Samsung 950 Pro impossible to find?

[pearsons_11114]

Bought a pair almost two years ago and now they are extremely hard to find or extremely expensive (almost $600) on Amazon. What gives? Are newer models so much better that the supply is over and there no more to be found? Sucks because I would to get another one to put with my RAID 0 array, don't want to have to buy all new drives. Thanks!

 

[jaslion]

Bought a pair almost two years ago and now they are extremely hard to find or extremely expensive (almost $600) on Amazon. What gives? Are newer models so much better that the supply is over and there no more to be found? Sucks because I would to get another one to put with my RAID 0 array, don't want to have to buy all new drives. Thanks!

They got replaced by the 960 and well eventually the leftover stock runs out.

 

[therealduckofdeath]

You don't have to match models for RAID0 setups. As long as you're not buying a model with a lower SATA compatibility type and makes sure it's at least as big as your current one you're all good to go.

 

[USAFRet]

950 Pro in RAID 0:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

tl-dr: It may in fact be slower than individual drives.

 

[pearsons_11114]

You don't have to match models for RAID0 setups. As long as you're not buying a model with a lower SATA compatibility type and makes sure it's at least as big as your current one you're all good to go.

Thank your for answering my unasked question. This is partly what was driving me to want to purchase the 950 Pro rather than whatever is the latest. However, that still leaves the concern that the older drives would negate the performance edge a new drive would have. Depending on the size of that difference I might or might not think it was worth it.

 

[pearsons_11114]

950 Pro in RAID 0:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

tl-dr: It may in fact be slower than individual drives.

Having read it, my understanding is not that it's slower, just not twice as fast (as you would normally expect) because of the controller bottleneck.

I did a ton of research before I configured things this way. For many typical workloads, RAID 0 doesn't confer much advantage because sequential read/write is not a bottleneck, and don't have high queue depths. However, I do software development and have a ton of VMs. I have to figure this must be exercising those items because RAID 0 has always provided me a pretty dramatic improvement, no benchmarking required. This video convinced me it's worth doing. The tl;dr there is that the board I have has a faster controller, so it takes more to saturate, and even after saturation, it keeps helping with latency at high queue depths. Not sure how that is physically possible, but latency is something that a user notices, and it definitely conforms with my subjective experience.

 

[USAFRet]

From the above:

In all of those tests, there was no real difference. ALl almost exactly equal.

But if you're happy with it, and want to risk the data loss and hassle, go for it.