Manufacturer: Samsung Price: $ 500 US Author: Steven Walton Date: 04/22/2015

[ Introduction ]

Today we have Samsung’s SM951 M.2 PCIe SSD on hand for a round of benchmarks. Although this is an OEM product a few retailers are making it possible to purchase the SM951 and that’s great news for enthusiasts, because their rig is in desperate need of one... Last year’s Haswell ‘Refresh’ wasn’t particularly exciting, at least from a CPU perspective as Intel failed to offer anything new. That said their Z97 chipset introduced SATA Express and the M.2 interface to mainstream computing and this was a big deal for the storage world. At the time we were particularly excited about the M.2 specification formerly known as the Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF). Shortly after the arrival of Z97 motherboards supporting the M.2 interface the Samsung SSD XP941 was announced, a client SSD that used PCIe 2.0 x4 allowing it to top speeds of 1170MB/s read and 930MB/s write. To date no other M.2 device has challenged the XP941, the only other PCIe 2.0 M.2 products have come from SanDisk and Plextor using a slower Marvell controller. However unlike the Plextor M6e for example the Samsung XP941 is an OEM-only product making it difficult to acquire, and yet despite that it has been relatively popular among enthusiasts. Samsung announced the successor to the XP941 four months ago back in January 2015 and unfortunately this is again an OEM product, which is why we have only been able to get our hands on a sample now. Making the SM951 available to all is an Australian based company called RamCity. Although the SM951 is listed in Australian dollars on their website, they are selling to US customers via way of Amazon for $460 US, which seems very reasonable for such a high speed M.2 device. Recently we reviewed the new Intel SSD 750 Series 1.2TB, a PCI Express SSD supporting the NVMe protocol. The SSD 750 Series proved to be very fast but was equally expensive costing $1.02 per gigabyte for the 400GB model. The key feature of the SSD 750 Series is its NVMe support and this is a feature Samsung initially announced that the SM951 would have but later dropped. This means the SM951 uses the AHCI command set as Samsung pushes the release of the NVMe SSDs back. The reason for this is likely due to compatibility, as NVMe support isn’t wide spread for client SSDs yet. Still if Samsung’s claims are true then the lack of NVMe support shouldn’t be too devastating, as read speeds are said to reach 2150MB/s and write speeds 1500MB/s. The Intel SSD 750 Series 1.2TB drive maxed out at 2400MB/s read and 1200MB/s write using the NVMe driver so the SM951 should have an advantage in the write tests.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< Samsung SM951 in Detail How We Test Benchmarks: File Copy Test Benchmarks: Real-World Applications Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Benchmarks: Atto Disk Benchmark Benchmarks: PCMark7 Benchmarks: PCMark8 Final Thoughts Next Page ->

insuder

Posted on: 04/24/2015 04:55 AM This is awesome thanks. Can you get the NVMe one now?

Mangel

Posted on: 05/03/2015 12:35 PM I have the XP941 which I purchased from RamCity. It was not an easy setup but thanks to Rod's blog it wasn't impossible either. A few things bug me about these drives which wouldn't keep me from buying them. GPT partition - clone to other drive is not bootable (unless you use another m.2 - maybe). No magician software - sometimes you feel a slowdown after intensive use, which corrects itself in short time as (I guess) trim does it's job. When do you guys think the NVMe will be out? Will it be OEM? Read somewhere about some bugs - anything on this?

Mangel

Posted on: 05/04/2015 11:11 AM Just wanted to clear up that the issues I read about were in the legitreviews test of the sm951 nvme drive.