Conclusion
Announcement: Despite the circumstance that the rating of a product is based on as many
objective facts as possible there are factors which can have an influence on a
rating after publication. Every autor may perceive data differently over time
whereas one possible reason for example is a deeper background knowledge or
understanding of certain processes. Certain unforseen market conditions as well
as changes have the potential to render a descision made at a certain point in
time obsolete.
With their 950 Pro M.2 series Samsung created new SSD, which address enthusiasts and professionals. All new NVMe drives these dasy simply raise the bar in terms of performance to another level and bringt the entire consumer market big step forward. Throughput rates in the region of 2'200 MB/s are about four times as much then what’s achievable with SATA-III, which puts these NVMe drives in a completely different league.
In terms of raw performance our test drive was able to score 924 MB/s sequential
write and 1'868 MB/s sequential read throughput. When it comes to 4K
IOPS we measured 83'300 IOPS regarding random read and 220'700 regarding random
write. The performance of this drive is simply insane, outperforming the SATA-III standard almost by a factor of four regarding sequential read.
On another note we also
had a look at performance with different queue depths as you can see on page 10.
In the case of random read performance at QD1 we see 12'700 IOPS and when it comes to random write we measured 58'000 IOPS.
Today the 950 Pro M.2 is available with either 256 Gigabyte or 512 Gigabyte capacity. The 256 Gigabyte model costs 191 Euro and the 512 Gigabyte M.2 stick sells at 319 Euro. Those drive are definitely not cheap, but considering what you get the price is adequate. The performance is just mindblowing and the whole NVMe standard helps pushing the boudries of how fast SSDs can be. Should you be an enthusiast or a professional looking for a fast M.2 drive, then we can recommend these drive without a shadow of a doubt.