Samsung SM951 NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD Review

Samsung SM951 NVMe Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The Samsung SM951 NVMe was found to be an impressive M.2 SSD, but NVMe is very new not for everyone. For starters you have to have a motherboard that features a UEFI BIOS that supports NVMe. Then you have to jump through some hoops to get Windows installed as the Samsung XP941 and SM951 SSDs don’t have an OPROM, so you can’t just toss in the Windows installation disc of USB drive and go. You have to use a program like RUFUS to install Windows on the drive in EFI mode. Rod over at RAM City has a guide on how to setup Windows on a Samsung XP941 or SM951 that you can check out here.

Once you get the drive up and running you’ll have to use the Microsoft NVMe driver as Samsung doesn’t have their own driver. You’ll also find out that Samsung offers zero customer support for the SM951 NVMe drive since it’s an OEM only device and running something simple like secure erase could be a total PITA unless you wanted to run Linux and perform the operation on another system. To top all that off there is the whole Force Unit Access (FUA) issue that is entirely new to us and many in the industry. The Intel NVMe drives aren’t impacted by FUA’s and since this is the only other NVMe drive that we have to test! We aren’t sure what the overall impact will be for enthusiasts using this drive with the Microsoft Windows 8.1 NVMe driver, but you can flip through our benchmark pages with this drive being tested as a secondary storage device and quickly see the write performance is nothing to write home about!

The Sasmsung SM951 AHCI drives might be better for those that are looking for something without so many complexities! You can also find them online today in-stock and buy one!

Samsung SM951 M.2 PCIe SSD Drives
Part Number	Capacity and Features	Sequential (R/W)	Max 4K IOPS (R/W)	Price
MZ-HPV128	M.2 Form Factor 128GB	2000/600 MB/s	90k/70k IOPS	$159.99
MZ-HPV256	M.2 Form Factor 256GB	2150/1200 MB/s	90k/70k IOPS	$264.95
MZ-HPV512	M.2 Form Factor 512GB	2150/1500 MB/s	90k/70K IOPS	$499.95

Legit Bottom Line: The Samsung SM951 NVMe looks promising, but it is complicated and it might be a good thing that it isn’t readily available on the market just yet!