With thanks to Spackbace's cashback deal, Shopping Express has been able to drop a couple of prices on their drives making them the cheapest in the country. Free shipping is included.
Samsung 256GB 950 Pro M.2 (PCIe) SSD $199 after cashback
Samsung 512GB 950 Pro M.2 (PCIe) SSD $369 after cashback
$30 cashback link
I hate when this happens. I paid $255 last month.
Hoping my cashback will go through.
If there is a rep watching, I purchased this from Shopping Express a few weeks ago for $255. Any chance of a partial refund of the difference? :D
A few credit cards have a price guarantee where you can claim the difference if a price drops. I don't think it's fair to call for SE refund the difference, prices (everywhere) change regularly and you can't expect them to refund everyone any time that happens.
You didn't purchase it during the qualifying period May 16 - Jun 12, so no cashback for you.
If you were happy with the price when you bought it, what's the problem?
Are PCIE SSDs worth it in real world computing? Obviously the read/write benchmarks look great but do they make a considerable improvement the way a HDD -> SSD does?
HDD -> SSD: you can definitely feel a huge improvement.
SATA SSD -> PCIe SSD: you will hardly feel a difference, especially with general / reasonably light usage. The sequential read and write speed has improved. However, most people cannot utilise that advantage. SSD's big advantage over traditional HDD is the random read / write. Also, your PC/laptop/device really needs to support PCIe 3.0 completely (even the latest Skylake NUCs is limited to PCIe 2.0, there is a development BIOS to enable PCIe 3.0, but it is not available to general public, and if it weren't because of a review site testing it and found the issue, we probably won't see PCIe 3.0 support for Skylake NUCs). 950 Pro M.2 is probably the fastest SSD right now, but you need to make sure your PC can support it fully.
Is this development bios free, if it's where can I download from? Thx
Intel is planning to release it before the end of this month. I hope they will. However, the random read/write does not improve much. It is more for bragging that when running a benchmark software, the sequential read can reach 2500+.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. Real life, general benchmark tests, the difference is so minor. More concerned about the WHEA issue with the NUC. I hope intel is telling the truth and the latest BIOS does fix it (make sure you apply it, otherwise your NUC could be damaged). I kinda regret getting the NUC and 950 Pro m.2 due to the known issues with the NUC.
Thank you @netsurfer for this excellent explanation
95 percent of people probably won't notice any real world difference.
If you use a PC casually or for games you are better off putting the extra money on capacity instead.
Don't listen to the above posters.
The 4k speed for these pcie m.2 ssds are much better than conventional ssds.
I upgraded to this ssd when Kogan had 20% off ebay and I definitely notice a difference between this my old samsung 850.
Can you give some examples of where you notice the difference?
Unzipping large compressed files. Moving data from one place to another. Opening large files in programs.
some TLC based SSDs had severe throttling issues when writing large files. They had 550MB/s writes with small files and in benchmarks but the Cruicial BX200 series for example were as slow as mechanical HDD (80MB/s) once they filled the small MLC cache.
iirc the Samsung EVO 850 also had throttling issues but only down to 300-400MB/s
Depends on use. If you just want games to load a little faster, the difference is negligible to a standard SSD. For things like video editing (mainly with raw and looosely encoded files, fraps recordings as an example) it helps a little. It's a much smoother experience when you're able to seek through loosely encoded video files without any lagg at all.
For a better understanding, think of it like this: the difference between an SSD and HDD is response times AND speed. Difference between sata and PCI SSDs is basically only speed, the response time differences are negligible. The bump in real-world performance isn't the same as HDD > SSD.
I use a Samsung m.2 on 4 lane pcie in AMD A88X asrock with special Asrock bios to access the M.2 for booting.
Start up is almost instant. Works very well. But depends on what you are doing for every day work. Slow stuff like browsing no difference. P
I have a MoBo with thw ultra m2 thingy and edit/create videos a at least once a month. Wouls this help with rendering times?
Probably not. At least not compared to a lower end SSD.
Unless of course your CPU can render video at over 500 MB/s
6700K but only running 4.4 atm
No real difference to an SSD.
There is a slight difference while editing loosely encoded files (you can seek through clips more smoothly without any loading times), though there shouldn't be any difference in rendering times.
is this the ones used for the Macbook Pro's ssds?
No, Macbook Pro SSDs are custom, but the performance is of the same level, these probably slightly better than the MBP SSDs.
sorry NoRotation, what i mean is that, can this be a good substitute/upgrade for my Macbook Pro's ssd?
No, MBP SSD have a custom interface that's different from M.2. In general it's impossible to replace the hard drives of recent models of MBP.
This would be very tempting. Though I'd have to buy a PC that supports M.2
You can buy a PCIe card for around $10 on eBay.
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Adapter-Card-to-PCI-E-x4-for-M-2-…
Benchmarks on these Samsung 950's run at around 2000MB/s read, 4x faster than SATA
Can they run in laptop on pciex3 if I have one spare?
I have one of these in the 256Gb model and it's amazing.
Keep in mind that while the 256Gb model is extremely fast at write speeds, the 512Gb model is twice as fast yet again.
How is the 512 model twice as fast?
I won't explain the nitty gritty but the 256gb model has a write speed estimate of approx 900mbps and the 512gb model has a write speed estimate of approx 1500mbps.
Generally speeking, larger HDD's are faster than their smaller counterparts of the same make. Especially in SSD's and even more so in M.2 NVMe drives. If you want the fastest then you can even RAID them and get 5000+mbps read speeds.
Thanks for the explanation. Will look at the 512GB version.
That's rated sequential read/write. In real life usage, you won't get double the performance.
It is a marketing trick. Sequential read/write is the easiest area for flash devices to speed up. In real life, you won't feel double the speed difference.
RAM is much faster than SSD. I had a slow PC, which I tried to fix it with SSD because I didn't want to buy more RAM for it (I had spare SSDs). It did not work, I put more RAM in and it made a bigger difference than the SSD did in this case.
I have the 512GB version of 950 Pro m.2. It is not that fast.
I'm getting better than advertised results when benchmarking. Did you install Windows as GPT instead of MBR, using UEFIand AHCI? I found a good improvement after converting to the newer GPT partition format. Boot time is about 5 seconds with Fast Boot enabled.
It's all relative to be honest. My better to best SATA3 SSDs are already averaging 5 seconds boot time. Furthermore, some of the restarts are like 2 seconds (SATA3 SSD). Also, it somewhat depends on the motherboard too. For example, on a motherboard with more features (more SATA ports, other additional ports), the BIOS seek/boot takes longer, whereas on a simpler motherboard (with less features), the BIOS seek/boot is a lot faster. While the OS load speed is roughly the same, the BIOS boot time does add up to the overall experience.
These drives are faster, but 2X faster means they need to cold boot to Windows in 2.5 seconds. When stating these m.2 drives are 2X faster, you really need to compare it to the equivalent SATA3 drives - i.e. Samsung 850 Pro (not 850 Evo and not SSDs which are 1 gen or 1/2 gen behind). Sequential read/write speed is a good marketing trick. Random read/write is more important to general public / general use.
An example is SD cards. I have a class 10 SD card (cheaper than my class 6 Sandisk SD card), it cannot even record 1080p consistently. The class 6 Sandisk SD card can record 1080p no problem. However, when you benchmark the cards, the class 10 has faster sequential read/write (but much slower 4K random read/write). You cannot just look at sequential read/write figures.
does anyone have this in their PC?
how does it compare to Samsung Evo SSD?
thanks,
it's tempting :)
General PC use won't be affected. If you're copying large data or compressing/decompressing files this will come in handy. Not worth the premium imo.
I'm happy with sata ssd's, just wish capacity was improved
Great choice for Mini-ITX motherboard, but how is the temp?
But $6 (for the 256gb) difference to MSY, pick up and no waiting for postie. Unless if you don't live near MSY or CBF go to MSY…
Fml i bought this last month for $459… :(
deal on the 850 pls :)
SSDs still can't beat RamDisk though :-) Caveat is that you can't turn off your PC…
Good luck running your OS from a RAMDisk
If I convert 'Samsung 512GB 950 Pro M.2 (PCIe)' into a portable USB3 drive,
would it still be faster than a
converted 'Samsung 512GB 950 Pro SATA' portable USB3 drive ?
Note: when I say 'converted', I mean I wrap it in an aftermarket USB3 enclosure drive.
USB3 or USB 3.1 will be the bottleneck here. USB speed will be max at 5gbps (640 MB/s) and 10 gbps (1200 MB/s) respectively. But the 950 in PCIE will run at 2200 MB/s. So by converting it to a SATA drive, you are limiting it to SATA speed which is about 6 gbps (700-ish MB/s max in theory). So basically the key bottle neck is USB3.0 thus both will run at similar speed (640 MB/s). Unless you can be sure it is a USB3.1 drive and a PCIE drive would run faster.
And since you are using it as a USB drive, I assume you might be using that for file transfer? So obviously, your receiving drive has to be fast enough to take such speed so that will be another issue for your to think about.
If you use the NVMe drives on anything but a PCIe, you'll be bottlenecking it's speed… think of it like having a Bugatti Veyron or Koneigsegg CCX, driving it and being limited to Sydney peak hour traffic.
The NVMe drives are fast. You can also set them up in RAID configuration.
But, if there are people wondering if it's worth upgrading to a computer that can natively support NVME, wait for a while, until it becomes mainstream. At the moment, only number Nazis will notice any difference, and then it'd only be during transferring large files.
That 950 Drive has written 2.3 TB since I've had it November. The speed is most noticeable when installing a new OS, or transferring drive images of about 10-20 Gb.
For the mean time, if people wanted some speed, they could cheat, and get an 850 Pro and use it in Samsungs Rapid mode.
I have both drives in my laptop right now, and I've totally butchered my slots because it's an old laptop that was one of the first to support the NVMe drives last year.
Here's a screenshot of my current setup, that 850 is a fresh drive. It's a SATA, not a mSATA, I've just dremmeled the cover to make it fit.
The 950 is in the Red cradle, with the 850 under it. The drive on the right is a 7.2K in raid… I can add it's numbers to the screenshot for dramatic effect to show how slow magnetic disks are now, but then there's too many numbers.
Seq Read @ 280MB/s, Write 300 MB/S (Not quite throttled by SATA 3.0, about 50% capacity)
IOPS Read 1600, IOPS Write 1300… just from the IOPS, you could say that "the SSD's are 100x faster"…
The 950s are currently not compatible with RAPID Mode, hence why I recommended waiting for NVME to go mainstream- as this may change in the future once more people (aside from Samsung - forcing Samsung to compete for speeds) start developing more drivers for NVME
You have an impressive surgery skills for a laptop. How can I findout if a laptop supports nvme.
I have following 4 slots in my laptop. Wondering if I should try 950 in it.
You could run a pciex extender to run the 950, but if you use an adapter for the 950 to run it in what you have right now without pulling out the wlan, you'll bottle neck at 6gbps (Sata 3) you could still get it and use it until you get a native pciex slot. But if it's not in the near future, prices on these drives will probably drop by the time you upgrade
Wanted to clarify..
6 Gbps = 750 MB(yte)ps = 6000Mbps
PCIE >10Gbps
Got mine today! Cheers TA.
Thanks TA, they were significantly dearer when I checked this morning at SE.