SAMSUNG SM950 PRO NVMe SSD

[larryccf]

if you check, you'll find brass & copper both have a higher rate or co-efficient of thermal conductivity than aluminum - that was reason mfgrs like Henry Ford used brass for their radiators back in the early 1900s.

CF isn't hard to machine once laid up and cured, but it can be mold injected. Back about 2004 i fabricated a heatsink from CF simply by forming it into "C" channels and bonding them side by side onto the bottom of an aluminum oil pan - dropped my oil temps by 11 degrees F. Basically it was a flat plate of CF, with ribs standing about 3/4" tall and spaced 1/2" apart. For the purposes of a heatsink for these SSDs, i'd lay up CF cloth till it was 1/4" thick, cure it to 175F, then mill channels or grooves in it maybe .090" wide, leaving ribs standing .185" tall and .060" thick. Then cut it into squares the same dimensions or slightly larger than the controller.

but to give you an idea of how fast it conducts heat - i took a pc of CF cloth (think in terms of fiberglass cloth before it's been laid up with epoxy resin).

I laid it over a vice and with a propane torch (1400F) heated one spot. It was surprising that i had to hold the flame the exact distance from the cloth in order to get a spot the size of a quarter (or 25 cent pc) to glow cherry red. If i let the torch move forward or away from the cloth a few mm, the glow would immediately disappear. Finally when i had it glowing cherry red, i put the torch down, cherry glowing spot immediately went black like the rest of the cloth, I waited 1-2 seconds, and was able to touch the very spot that had been glowing red - it had transferred the heat away from that spot that quickly.

Diamonds are similiar but they're also carbon based, but the order, in terms of thermal conductivity is carbon, brass, copper then aluminum.

Back to your renders, those thumbnails wouldn't expand, and at 67 my eyes ain't what they used to be.

What also hit me - those mini or SFF computers like the NUC, I'm wondering what in the hell they do or how they control the heat with the M.2 socket on the bottom side of the motherboard.

 

[fvbounty]

Larry we are old guys....lol...66 for me!

 

[larryccf]

a mentor of mine used to say "old age ain't for pu**ies" - i appreciate that stmt more and more each day

 

[fvbounty]

a mentor of mine used to say "old age ain't for pu**ies" - i appreciate that stmt more and more each day

You got that right.....the golden years....lol

 

[miki_8]

Back to your renders, those thumbnails wouldn't expand, and at 67 my eyes ain't what they used to be.

Sorry Larry for inconvenience I`ve changed material to brass, so heatsink is more visible.

Your idea about CF sounds very interesting, but since I have no experience with that material I have no idea how I could make heatsink I showed on renders below.

01

02

03

 

[larryccf]

i like the design - and brass would definitely be a better material choice. If you wanted a product to sell on the web, that one would sell on looks alone. If you built it in aluminum as well, and did some tests and showed those results, offering both versions (obviously the aluminum one would be cheaper), the brass version would sell even better.

I question the size, ie being full length of the ssd unless your goal is to form ice from the condensation.

Just for some idea, i wrote or rendered a 41 gb video file to the 950 this afternoon - highest temp i saw after 29 minutes of rendering / writing was 57C. Granted it took that much time because of the conversion process, so the 950 wasn't being written to as fast as it could have been. With all the reviewers identifying 72C as the thermal limit temp, a 15 degree margin is fairly comfortable to me. And even at 72C, it just means the thermal limiter kicks in, no SSD meltdown or anything catastrophic.

As to the CF, it can be bought pre-laid up or preformed, in rods, bar stock or sheets of various thickness - it is NOT cheap. But to give you a real life example of the heat transfer difference, we fabricate or manufacture firearm silencers (legally, we hold a federal firearms mfgring license). On one pistol model, that we offered in aluminum, i thought i'd try CF and actually put it off for a couple of years - something in the back of my head said the epoxy resin used to wet out the CF when it's being formed, would act to impede heat transfer. When we finally got around to it, the results were pretty amazing. Keep in mind all we fabricated in CF was the tube body, the internal components were aluminum, both baffles and spacer rings.

when we took the prototype out to the range, we had two identical 45 cal pistols, one pistol with an aluminum silencer and the other with CF silencer, with two shooters and two guys loading magazines. The shooters were to put 500 rounds thru each can (silencer) and shooting started at 1:00 PM - at 2:15 PM, with continuous shooting, ambient temperature was 94F. I had the shooters run the last magazine on each thru at rapid fire pace.

For background, the flash signature at the muzzle measured at 1640F, so that's a lot of btu, from repeated shots, being pumped into those cans. After the last shot, the aluminum can measured at 174F, the CF can at 115F. Remember that's even though the internal components were aluminum on both cans - but being in contact with those components, the CF still takes the heat out of the alum and into the atmosphere. But still the difference is right at 60F or 1/3 cooler.

Within 45 seconds or so from the last shot, the CF can was at ambient temp and we could safely put it away in its nylon holster. The alum can, we had to wait 12-13 minutes for it to cool down enough that i felt safe in putting it away (i didn't want the holsters melting from heat build up).

If brass weren't so heavy, we'd use it for pistol cans, but there's an issue with excessive weight and pistol cycling that makes brass prohibitive.

 

[fvbounty]

Well I would never in a million years think CF was so good at heat dissipation....thanks for all the info...who said you can't teach old dogs new tricks!

 

[Kaido]

Just for some idea, i wrote or rendered a 41 gb video file to the 950 this afternoon - highest temp i saw after 29 minutes of rendering / writing was 57C. Granted it took that much time because of the conversion process, so the 950 wasn't being written to as fast as it could have been. With all the reviewers identifying 72C as the thermal limit temp, a 15 degree margin is fairly comfortable to me. And even at 72C, it just means the thermal limiter kicks in, no SSD meltdown or anything catastrophic.

I'd be curious to test a board with dual ports built-in (or a card, if there's no performance hit) - it'd be great to have a couple of the 500's for big projects like that. Really the only thing I use my desktop for anymore is video projects, so it'd be slick to have a dual-speedy-SSD setup like that!

 

[larryccf]

something else i've learned about the full meaning of non-support for an "OEM" product vs "retail" version: While the samsung data migration did copy or clone my OS drive, a 256 gb samsung xp941, to the 950 PRO, it won't clone from the 950 PRO back to the xp941, and it's not an issue of the xp941 being half the volume of the 950, as the samsung data migration did clone the 950 to a 256 GB samsung 810, which oddly enough is a 5 yr old "OEM" SSD (Dell laptop). I'm just sure i understand samsung's decision to not allow their data migration software to clone to one of their OEM drives - I can understand sammy not allowing it to clone to a non-samsung drive, as obviously that would be supporting a competitor's product, but their own mfgr'd product??

EaseUS ToDo Backup, when i tried it to clone to the 950, would recognize it as a NVMe drive, but would error out when i'd clik the proceed button to start the clone. So last night, using EaseUS, i tried to clone from the 950 to the xp941, and in windows it recognized the NVMe drive and listed it in both the source drive window as well as the target drive window. But when i hit "proceed", it asked to reboot into (i presume Linux), and once in Linux, it didn't proceed with cloning, just sat there at the main window - so i selected "clone" and it opened the source window, and sonuva bmt, the 950 was not listed.

I was hoping to use the xp941 as my "clone" drive, to keep as backup - i've either got to wait for EaseUS to get up to speed with NVMe drives, or buy another 950 PRO. Another choice would be to try Macrium Reflect, as someone in this thread reported they'd had success using it to clone.

fwiw

 

[Redstorm]

I was hoping to use the xp941 as my "clone" drive, to keep as backup - i've either got to wait for EaseUS to get up to speed with NVMe drives, or buy another 950 PRO. Another choice would be to try Macrium Reflect, as someone in this thread reported they'd had success using it to clone.

fwiw

Gparted live will clone your partitions, with nvme support, is how i cloned mine. after i had cloned to the 950, i cloned the 950 back to an old 300GB Sata HDD as a backup. shrink partition, copy to HDD, then grow the 950 partition back to full capacity.

 

[larryccf]

thanks - i'll look into it

the samsung migration software did clone the 950 to the samsung 810, and i'm sure it'll clone it to one of my 840 SSDs

 

[PainterArt]

Moving your Win 7 installation to your Samsung 950 Pro NMVe RAID

http://www.savemecomputertips.com/tips/winosto950proraid.html

This should help many people deal with the Samsung 950 Pro NMVe. There is a pdf of the instructions and you can do this with a least Win 7 through 10.

As far as I know I am the only person to have done this. I would be really interested if people can repeat it. There are a lot of steps but it is easy.

 

[Redstorm]

Moving your Win 7 installation to your Samsung 950 Pro NMVe RAID

http://www.savemecomputertips.com/tips/winosto950proraid.html

This should help many people deal with the Samsung 950 Pro NMVe. There is a pdf of the instructions and you can do this with a least Win 7 through 10.

As far as I know I am the only person to have done this. I would be really interested if people can repeat it. There are a lot of steps but it is easy.

Win7 to the 950 is easy, even changed mine from a MBR to GPT/UEFI system.

Why RAID though, the 950 is fast enough as it is.

FYI your instructions state "Windows installation must be on a GPT harddrive." this is not true, I had my original MBR install booting from the 950 pro just fine.

 

[phillyman36]

For someone who does a little video encoding and converting my blu ray movies i buy to mkv would it be better to use this as an os drive or a secondary drive? I have a Samsung 850 pro 512GB with my os on it.

 

[PainterArt]

Win7 to the 950 is easy, even changed mine from a MBR to GPT/UEFI system.

Why RAID though, the 950 is fast enough as it is.

FYI your instructions state "Windows installation must be on a GPT harddrive." this is not true, I had my original MBR install booting from the 950 pro just fine.

And have you shared how to do this somewhere. The MBR install booting from the 950 pro? or is it you installed Win 7 with an MBR boot on to a 950 pro?

When I went to go about doing it, all I read were people having problems transferring but not with a fresh install. Anyway my instruction are for transferring an OS with out RAID drivers on to 950 pro RAID.

Everything is easy if you know how to do it.

As far as speed: http://www.vortez.net/articles_pages/samsung_950_pro_256gb_raid_review,5.html

People have different goals as to why they would go with a RAID or non-RAID.

 

[Redstorm]

And have you shared how to do this somewhere. The MBR install booting from the 950 pro? or is it you installed Win 7 with an MBR boot on to a 950 pro?

Its not really worth writing up as its just a case of using the provided Samsung migration software to clone the already MBR booting install of Windows 7. nothing too it.

I have written up how to migrate Windows 7 from MBR to GPT to the 950 pro here for anyone interested in doing that. I did come across some peculiarities when connecting additional disks after the process that caused Windows 7 boot to hang on the logo.

http://www.geektech.co.nz/convert-mbr-to-gpt-without-data-loss

 

[larryccf]

For someone who does a little video encoding and converting my blu ray movies i buy to mkv would it be better to use this as an os drive or a secondary drive? I have a Samsung 850 pro 512GB with my os on it.

Frankly, i'm not sure right now - someone over on tom's pointed out that enabling "RAPID" mode in samsung magician seems to crank the read/write numbers up quite a bit - apparently RAPID stakes out a portion of your ram to use in conjunction with your sata SSD - i just enabled it and ran a benchmark in magician, and below are the results. IF those numbers are real, the write speed is a little over 3X faster than the 950, and read is a little less than the 950.

I just converted a 43 GB blu-ray or m2ts file to mkv. Tonite or tomorrow i will try running it thru handbrake, reading from one of the 840 EVOs, writing to the 950, then writing to the xp941, then moving the file to the 950 and writing or rendering to the 840.

I'll report back tomorrow with what the results are, in terms of GB rendered per minute

 

[larryccf]

Well, i ran a number of different trials rendering the 42.3 GB video file from one drive to another, trying different combinations. I rendered to the 50% mark in Handbrake, and noted the volume of the file rendered as well as the time. In all the below results, the OS resided on the 950 PRO.

Tomorrow i'll move the OS to a 2nd 840 EVO i have in the system, and try writing to and from the 950 with the OS removed. To be frank, i'm not expecting any better results - i'm starting to believe my "bottleneck" is occurring at the cpu - even though it's an i7-4790 at 4.0 GHz, in task manager it showed 99-100% usage in all of the attempts.

So far the results seem to be statistically near identical, no matter which direction i rendered to or which drive i rendered from

as far as Samsung Magician rapid mode creating ramdisk, JohnnyLucky posted a response over in tom's forum re the use of RAPID mode in magician:

"...Samsung's Rapid Mode is a dummied down version of a ramdisk. Currently the total system memory that can be used as a ramdisk is limited to 25% of total ram, not to exceed 4GB. In addition, Samsung's Rapid Mode will not load certain large files into the ramdisk. Large image, video, and document files will not be loaded...."

the only part i question in his response, is the 4 gb limitation - i saw 6.9 TO 7.98 GB memory usage whenever the 840 EVO was either the source or the target drive, otherwise i saw 4-5 gb memory usage in task manager

fwiw

 

[bradly1101]

Well, i ran a number of different trials rendering the 42.3 GB video file from one drive to another, trying different combinations. I rendered to the 50% mark in Handbrake, and noted the volume of the file rendered as well as the time. In all the below results, the OS resided on the 950 PRO.

Tomorrow i'll move the OS to a 2nd 840 EVO i have in the system, and try writing to and from the 950 with the OS removed. To be frank, i'm not expecting any better results - i'm starting to believe my "bottleneck" is occurring at the cpu - even though it's an i7-4790 at 4.0 GHz, in task manager it showed 99-100% usage in all of the attempts.

So far the results seem to be statistically near identical, no matter which direction i rendered to or which drive i rendered from

as far as Samsung Magician rapid mode creating ramdisk, JohnnyLucky posted a response over in tom's forum re the use of RAPID mode in magician:

"...Samsung's Rapid Mode is a dummied down version of a ramdisk. Currently the total system memory that can be used as a ramdisk is limited to 25% of total ram, not to exceed 4GB. In addition, Samsung's Rapid Mode will not load certain large files into the ramdisk. Large image, video, and document files will not be loaded...."

the only part i question in his response, is the 4 gb limitation - i saw 6.9 TO 7.98 GB memory usage whenever the 840 EVO was either the source or the target drive, otherwise i saw 4-5 gb memory usage in task manager

fwiw

I tried that experiment and included spinning disks in the mix and in every case the CPU was the limiting factor, a 6C/12T CPU.

 

[phillyman36]

@larrycff do you have makemkv? If you do can you test how long it take to take a blu ray movie and convert it to mkv file(since it doesnt encode) on both the 950 and you EVO?

Thanks

 

[larryccf]

actually i do have MakeMKV - got tired of the junkware DVDFAB i had been using. I use MakeMKV to rip the video file, but it rips 1:1, so i end up with a, well in this case, a 42.3 GB file, which wouldn't let me store 25 videos / TB.
Time to copy the entire BD disk with MakeMKV was about 24 minutes. My only gripe with MakeMKV - it doesn't offer the option to just pull out the one movie file i want, and not have to copy all the preview / trailer / director's comments files.

HandBrake does let me pull the one file out, and lets me downsize it to mp4-h.264, in this case it came out a 12 gb file, and still quality i'm happy with - if i look hard, i can see some slight resolution loss on a 63" screen tv, but on a 32" display it's more than fine. These are copies i use to take on the road and use in the RV.

Give HandBrake a try. The only cost is a voluntary donation - no actual purchase price.

 

[larryccf]

I tried that experiment and included spinning disks in the mix and in every case the CPU was the limiting factor, a 6C/12T CPU.

if you're using HandBrake, i'd love to know approx times to compress a given size file, whatever the size - curious what kind of time advantage a 6 core/12T cpu gives

 

[jkauff]

if you're using HandBrake, i'd love to know approx times to compress a given size file, whatever the size - curious what kind of time advantage a 6 core/12T cpu gives

Not much, I'm betting. When I went from an Ivy Bridge i5 to a Haswell i7 (4790K) I was expecting a big difference in encode times. Overclocked the chip from 4.4 to 4.8--still no appreciable change.

Same with I/O. Encoding to a fast SSD saves nothing over writing to even a 5400 RPM HDD.

When you're talking about a Blu-ray encode, which at the settings I use takes two hours or so, I'm not impressed that I'm saving a couple of minutes. The x264 algorithms don't seem to be appreciably helped by more cores or a faster CPU once you're running a capable system. They just need a lot of time to process each frame.

Hardware encode, of course, gets faster every generation, but a QuickSync H.264 encode just can't match the quality of a good x264 software encode. Maybe the Intel video engineers will do a better job on H.265.

 

[Deders]

Hardware encode, of course, gets faster every generation, but a QuickSync H.264 encode just can't match the quality of a good x264 software encode. Maybe the Intel video engineers will do a better job on H.265.

Interested to know if Intel has improved the quality over the generations. Last I saw was a comparison using Sandy Bridge Quick Sync.

 

[larryccf]

.......
Same with I/O. Encoding to a fast SSD saves nothing over writing to even a 5400 RPM HDD.

......

I noticed that and that's the part that has me scratiching the bald spot at the back of my head - would have thought the hard drive would be something of a bottleneck, but that didn't prove to be the case