Huge Speed difference between Samsung 950 Pro vs Samsung SM951, which should I buy?

Iggy__

Commendable
Mar 15, 2016
8
0
1,520
I have been looking at the Samsung 950 Pro and then I found this Thermal comparison between the 950 Pro and the SM951.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3GlInzvHr8

The reviewer does not notice it but it is obvious that the 950 Pro takes about 6 minutes 5 seconds to transfer 205Gb of data yet I noticed that the SM951 only takes 4 minutes 34 seconds to do that. So I have to assume that the SM951 is much faster than the 950 Pro by a good margin. Yet I have not seen any mentions of this speed difference or why it is.
Does anyone know about other measurements of the speeds of these?
I am now thinking it would be smart to buy the SM951 because of the huge speed difference.
I would appreciate any information and opinions about these two and which is the best choice.
Or is there something better in this price range?
SM951 256Gb currently $163.50 at Newegg
950 Pro 256Gb currently $181.99 at Newegg

The 2 year warranty difference is not a concern to me. Neither is Samsungs phony ram caching Magician software.



 
Solution
I'm not sure what you saw in that video was the best benchmark of overall SSD speed. He was copying data from the SSD, back to itself. There's a lot of factors that can throw off those numbers, such as formatted cluster size, file system type, background activity in OS.

I think this page has a better comparison, and explains where each one excels over the other. It's really a mixed result: http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-SM951-AHCI-PCIe-M2-256GB-vs-Samsung-950-NVMe-PCIe-M2-256GB/m24782vsm38570

JaredDM

Honorable
I'm not sure what you saw in that video was the best benchmark of overall SSD speed. He was copying data from the SSD, back to itself. There's a lot of factors that can throw off those numbers, such as formatted cluster size, file system type, background activity in OS.

I think this page has a better comparison, and explains where each one excels over the other. It's really a mixed result: http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-SM951-AHCI-PCIe-M2-256GB-vs-Samsung-950-NVMe-PCIe-M2-256GB/m24782vsm38570
 
Solution

Iggy__

Commendable
Mar 15, 2016
8
0
1,520
Hi I noticed that his graphs (on the top there is a graph with an expanding green bar) showed how long it was taking for the data to be transferred. The 951 took 4 minutes 34 seconds to transfer 205GB of data and the 950 took 6 minute 5 seconds which said to me that the 950 was reading at a very much slower rate ( a good 1/3rd longer time). So that made me wonder if the 950 is inferior somehow but it is confusing as so many people seem to like it.
I have looked at your link carefully and I noticed, apart from the sentimental scores, that they do seem like a mixed bag but the 951 does seem to have greatly faster scores in reads and writes in the Average User and Peak Lab Bench scores. I see they both have identical Effective Speed scores so this has added to my confusion.
I think Puget Systems would have made sure to have both tests as reasonably close as possible so I doubt that they would have been using the computer with other things going on during the test so wouldn't the tests results mean that the 951 is superior overall because data is being read and written at a much faster rate?

ADDENDUM
I found Puget systems article about this test. It seems that the 950 Pro throttles quicker than the 951 due to its high temperatures.

They wrote this:

"Due to the fact that the Samsung 950 Pro throttles sooner than the SM951, we actually saw much lower sustained performance on the 950 Pro than we expected. To copy all 205GB worth of ISOs, the 950 Pro took about 365 seconds while the SM951 only took about 274 seconds. This translates to a sustained file copy performance of about 562 MB/s for the 950 Pro and about 748 MB/s for the SM951. In other words, while the Samsung 950 Pro does have lower temperatures than the SM951, it achieves this by being much more aggressive in it's throttling.

In our opinion, we actually prefer the earlier throttling on the 950 Pro. 98 °C may still be extremely hot, but it is much better than 111 °C. In fact, while Samsung even mentions throttling on the overview page for the 950 Pro:

The 950 PRO also features Dynamic Thermal Throttling Protection technology, which controls the temperature of the device to reduce overheating and maintain a high level of sustained performance.

Samsung's overview page for the 950 Pro makes it clear that this drive is designed to throttle when the drive gets hot so the high temperature on the controller shouldn't impact the longevity of the drive. However, even if you are willing to trust that Samsung has addressed the high temperatures appropriately, you still will see a drop in performance if this drive gets too hot. And since that happens after only about a minute of sustained file transfer, it is likely that most users will run into this throttling at some point.

If you want a high performance drive that is able to achieve the advertised performance over prolonged periods of time, we would highly recommend using this drive in combination with a PCI-E adapter that includes a heatsink (we use this adapter ourselves) or otherwise affix a heatsink to the controller chip to help dissipate the heat."
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Product-Review-Samsung-950-Pro-512GB-M-2-Drive-725/

So the built in throttling is the cause of the slower performance. I do not know what to make of this. Anyone have any ideas?