Samsung Pro 950 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD Review

In this review I looked at the new Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD drive.  The drive is 256GB and is one of the first drives to combine M.2 and NVMe together on the same package.  As you can imagine the drive comes bare and is designed to be used on compliant motherboards with M.2 slots with 4x lanes of bandwidth.

Overall performance was extremely impressive and after a little frustration getting the drive fully operational I was hooked.  On the surface the PCI Express drive is extremely fast with Sequential Reads up to 2200MBps and 900MBps Writes.  According to our benchmarks the drive topped out at 2.36GB/s with an overall average considerably less than that. 

If you look at the following ATTO chart it will explain why.

At the top of the chart up until about 1MB the drive is showing the advertised speeds and then at 2MB up until 64MB the drive slows down to 1600 Read and 600 Write.  This sudden drop in performance is likely why our Real World tests were more in line with the reference drive in overall performance.

Performance aside I see a bright future for M.2 based expansion cards allowing MiniITX systems more options for expansion and even allowing system builders and casemodders more room in their builds for important stuff like watercooling loops and extra video cards.  The Samsung 950 Pro is a step in the right direction which can only get better as the technology matures. 

PCI Express Expansion Card
M.2 NVMe SSD
2.36GB/s Reads
Compact Form Factor
Enterprise Technology at an Enthusiast Price Level
Good Price per GB

256GB and 512GB offer different speeds
Slow Writes
Random write performance slower than expected