Am I wasting $$ on a Samsung 950 Pro SSD?

[thatsright]

Hello – I am currently building a new rig with i7-6700k CPU, Z170 Intel based board and 16GB of ram. For my main drive, I was going to get (perhaps still) a Samsung 950 Pro 256 GB (which is overkill for how much size I will l actually utilize on that drive). I am going to install Windows 10 and a few apps on the drive, but not much beyond that.


I read one review where it says there is almost no difference in performance from the the 951 128GB drive vs. the 950 256GB drive (even more size overkill size for me). I did see one Youtube video where they say there is no difference performance wise you would actually notice. I tried to find comparisons online but they are almost non-existent. Has anyone heard or seen evidence that would sway me either way? The 951 128GB costs $100 less vs 950 Pro 256GB.

Product Specs from newegg:

[FONT=&quot]950 Pro 256GB[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Performance[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Max Sequential Read[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Up to 2200 MBps[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Max Sequential Write[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Up to 900 MBps[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]4KB Random Read[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Up to 270,000 IOPS (4KB, QD32)
Up to 11,000 IOPS (4KB, QD1)[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]4KB Random Write[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Up to 85,000 IOPS (4KB, QD32)
Up to 43,000 IOPS (4KB, QD1)[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]951 128GB[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Performance[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Max Sequential Read[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Up to 2000 MBps[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Max Sequential Write[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Up to 600 MBps[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]4KB Random Read[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Up to 90,000 IOPS[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]4KB Random Write[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Up to 70,000 IOPS[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]

 

[Redstorm]

Either is a good choice,

I own both the Pro 950 512GB (in a x99 system) and a 256GB in a Skylake laptop.

Both absolutly fly.

 

[shabby]

I am going to install Windows 10 and a few apps on the drive, but not much beyond that.

Then yes its overkill, get the 850 evo its more than fast enough.
Windows and app's aren't going to load that much faster compared to the 850 evo, the bottleneck is elsewhere now, cpu/chipset perhaps?

 

[lehtv]

What use is your PC for? If it's just a home PC for gaming and other not too time critical stuff, I think yes you're wasting money on the 950 Pro. A normal SATA 6gb/s SSD like 850 EVO, BX100, MX200, etc. is enough for a fast user experience when it comes to loading times on the desktop and in games. I would rather spend money on 500GB capacity. I currently have a 850 EVO 500GB as my main drive, it's the perfect size given that 250GB would've already filled up from the OS, apps and games I have installed, but I still have plenty of space left.

 

[thatsright]

What use is your PC for? If it's just a home PC for gaming and other not too time critical stuff, I think yes you're wasting money on the 950 Pro. A normal SATA 6gb/s SSD like 850 EVO, BX100, MX200, etc. is enough for a fast user experience when it comes to loading times on the desktop and in games. I would rather spend money on 500GB capacity. I currently have a 850 EVO 500GB as my main drive, it's the perfect size given that 250GB would've already filled up from the OS, apps and games I have installed, but I still have plenty of space left.

I would use it for a modest amount of photoshop, audio playback and web browsing. For photoshop the most important thing is the amount of ram you have, then CPU (I'm more than set wirh those two) and last is HD. HD read times are far, far more important than write times.

 

[lehtv]

The best thing you can do for disk performance in Photoshop is to install the OS and software on one SSD, and use a separate physical SSD as a scratch disk. E.g. 250GB main drive, 120GB drive for scratch space. (Smaller ones are fine too, but not all that much less expensive. You could partition a 120GB drive into 32GB of scratch space and the rest for other things that don't clash with reads and writes during Photoshop use). But it won't make much of a difference whether those drives are with 500MB/s or 1GB/s reads and writes, as it's really your own proficiency with the software that determines how quickly you can get things done. Maybe (just maybe) the 950 Pro would make a difference for on-the-clock professional Photoshop use, but for non time critical work or hobby, I can't imagine it being worth a ~$100 investment.

In fact I would say an SSD scratch disk is probably not worth it for home Photoshopping. As long as you have plenty of RAM (16GB is fine, 32GB better for really big projects) and run the OS and software from an SSD, you're set.

Web browsing - not relevant what SSD you have. Any SSD is fast enough for a snappy web browser experience, and internet bandwidth is the bottleneck with loading sites. Audio playback - doesn't even matter whether you have an SSD.

 

[nerp]

You don't need the Pro. The EVO will be fine and dandy for your needs.

 

[bonehead123]

ALthough I agree with most of what has been said so far......

Since you are building a new rig, and IF you really, really want it to be a screamer....go with the Samsung 950Pro NvME m.2 drives......

I put 2 of them in my new skylake rig in January, and it DOES make a difference in anything and everything I do..... however, the 256 & 512gb models are significantly faster than the 128gb ones

 

[thatsright]

ALthough I agree with most of what has been said so far......

Since you are building a new rig, and IF you really, really want it to be a screamer....go with the Samsung 950Pro NvME m.2 drives......

I put 2 of them in my new skylake rig in January, and it DOES make a difference in anything and everything I do..... however, the 256 & 512gb models are significantly faster than the 128gb ones

Well now I'm leaning towards getting the sm951 128GB drive as my main boot/apps drive. Sure I could get the 950 Pro, but that and the sm951 have the same read speeds pretty much and I'll save ~$100 if I get the sm951. (Write speeds aren't that big of a deal for me.) Either one of these will be a different planet kind of speed improvement compared to my 'ole skool Intel X-25 SSD drive circa 2009 which has 1/10th speeds compared to both of these Samsung drives.

 

[Johnny Lucky]

The Samsung SM951, M.2 3.0 x 4, ACHI and NVME models are OEM ssd's. The 951's were never meant for consumer retail sales. That is why Samsung does not provide any warranties for the 951's.

The subject was addressed when the first technical reviews were published at the very beginning of last year. Here are links to the original technical reviews of the ACHI and NVME 951's published by AnandTech:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8979/samsung-sm951-512-gb-review

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9396/samsung-sm951-nvme-256gb-pcie-ssd-review

Eventually Samsung released the 950 Pro which is a consumer retail model that comes with a full factory warranty.

The OEM versions are normally manufactured for companies selling complete computers to customers. Samsung has lucrative contracts to supply OEM ssd's to companies like Dell, Lenovo, HP, and others. Sometimes the specifications are slightly different for each company. One company might want some extra features while another company might want fewer features. Each OEM version has its own Samsung product number and model number. When I tracked several 951's that were available on Ebay, the numbers identified them as "Dell Bulk Purchase" items.

EDIT - I should mention that OEM ssd's have a warranty of sorts. For example, you purchase a Lenovo mobile pc that comes with a Samsung OEM ssd. The OEM ssd goes bad. You would contact Lenovo instead of Samsung for service and support.

 

[Coup27]

Am I wasting $$ on a Samsung 950 Pro SSD?

Yes. A decent SATA drive like the 850 EVO or 850 Pro will be fine.

 

[h9826790]

For boot disk, OS operation etc, that's a waste. All you need is the high IOPS, but not the high sequential read / write speed (the PCIe SSD's main advantage over the SATA SSD). A 850 Evo is the good choice for that, much much cheaper. Work it as hard as possible until it die (many years later), then buy another updated one.

Those PCIe SSD is good for video editing etc as the scratch disk. Of course they are good to be the boot disk as well, but IMO, that's just way overkill. If you can get one for cheap, why not? But pay significant more to get a smaller size SSD, not quite worth for a normal home user.

I did some test on my own rig, I can't feel any difference for daily OS operation with a 840 Evo connect via SATA 2 or SATA 3 (of course, except copying large files, etc). I mean roughly the same boot time, same responsiveness...

I know another computer user make it more extreme by putting 4 SM951 in RAID 0, and guess what, roughly still the same boot time, and same feeling. He just did that for testing purpose, and basically proved SATA SSD with the modern architecture inside is good enough. No need to go for any extreme PCIe SSD (unless you know what you are doing, and you really need that speed for something).

 

[VirtualLarry]

I own a couple of SM951 128GB PCI-E 3.0 x4 M.2 AHCI SSDs, bought them off of Newegg's online ebay store.

I can't seem to get random 4K 32QD reads above 240MB/sec with CDM. Some YouTube video shows a screenshot of CDM, and they get twice that. I'm using a Skylake Z170 board with an Ultra M.2 32Gbit/sec slot, so I'm not sure what the issue is. I'm using Windows 7 64-bit. (One reason why I chose the SM951 AHCI model, rather than the 950 Pro NVMe model. Win7 installs just fine on it. I did install with UEFI though.)

 

[coercitiv]

I did some test on my own rig, I can't feel any difference for daily OS operation with a 840 Evo connect via SATA 2 or SATA 3 (of course, except copying large files, etc). I mean roughly the same boot time, same responsiveness...

This is the crux of the problem: unless the user has specific (semi-professional) loads, most everyday software will behave in similar fashion on SATA2 and SATA3 interfaces, and the diminishing returns will only get bigger as available bandwidth increases in PCIe. New drives simply do not offer revolutionary random r/w speeds.

My rule of thumb for buying SSDs still keeps up with the times: buy only what you expect to need in the following 2 years (both capacity and speed), because 2-3 years from now the money you saved will likely get you a faster or bigger drive to add to your system.

Case in point: for the money I spent on my 840 PRO 256GB in autumn 2013 I can almost buy a 850 PRO 512GB in spring 2016.

In the place of the OP I would rather spend my money on 32GB of RAM first, then think hard if I really need the high end SSD.

 

[thatsright]

This is the crux of the problem: unless the user has specific (semi-professional) loads, most everyday software will behave in similar fashion on SATA2 and SATA3 interfaces, and the diminishing returns will only get bigger as available bandwidth increases in PCIe. New drives simply do not offer revolutionary random r/w speeds.

My rule of thumb for buying SSDs still keeps up with the times: buy only what you expect to need in the following 2 years (both capacity and speed), because 2-3 years from now the money you saved will likely get you a faster or bigger drive to add to your system.

Case in point: for the money I spent on my 840 PRO 256GB in autumn 2013 I can almost buy a 850 PRO 512GB in spring 2016.

In the place of the OP I would rather spend my money on 32GB of RAM first, then think hard if I really need the high end SSD.

All good points, but.....

Perhaps 49% of performance gain (vs my Intel X-25 SSD and rest of the rig) with me getting a sm951 is mental and the other 51% is reality. With 16GB of RAM I'll get, even that is being very generous. The highest RAM usage I have ever seen Photoshop use is 6GB and ZERO scratch disk usage at that time. So anymore $$ on RAM I think is a waste. As I keep my media on other spindle drives (where performance is not critical, just space), I don't need the new SSD to be very big. And for around $100 for the 128GB sm951 isn't really much of a big outlay.

 

[coercitiv]

With 16GB of RAM I'll get, even that is being very generous. The highest RAM usage I have ever seen Photoshop use is 6GB and ZERO scratch disk usage at that time. So anymore $$ on RAM I think is a waste. As I keep my media on other spindle drives (where performance is not critical, just space), I don't need the new SSD to be very big. And for around $100 for the 128GB sm951 isn't really much of a big outlay.

This is not about program RAM usage, but rather about OS caching and maybe future proofing.

All my machines currently have 16GB of RAM and run Win 10. The 2 machines I work on usually have 2-4GB of RAM used for caching, while the third sees very light usage and usually sits around with 12GB RAM used for caching. I wouldn't buy more RAM for the very few occasions when my Photoshop goes over 16GB (2-3 times I had well over 30GB scratch files), I would do it because the OS knows how to use excess RAM.

I'm not advising you to buy more RAM, I'm just giving you an alternative to better asses the value of spending more on a high end drive. If you like the sm951 go ahead and take it, as you say it's a relatively small extra expense.

 

[thatsright]

This is not about program RAM usage, but rather about OS caching and maybe future proofing.

All my machines currently have 16GB of RAM and run Win 10. The 2 machines I work on usually have 2-4GB of RAM used for caching, while the third sees very light usage and usually sits around with 12GB RAM used for caching. I wouldn't buy more RAM for the very few occasions when my Photoshop goes over 16GB (2-3 times I had well over 30GB scratch files), I would do it because the OS knows how to use excess RAM.

I'm not advising you to buy more RAM, I'm just giving you an alternative to better asses the value of spending more on a high end drive. If you like the sm951 go ahead and take it, as you say it's a relatively small extra expense.