Samsung SM951 NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD Review

AS SSD Benchmark & PCMark 8

AS-SSD (1.7.4739.38088) Benchmark:

We have been running the AS-SSD Benchmark app for over some time now and found that it gives a broad result set. The programmer has worked very hard on this software and continues to make updates often so if you use it, show him some love and send him a donation. There are now three tests that are found within the tool and we’ll show the results from all three of them.

Benchmark Results: AS SSD showed the Samsung SM951 NVMe 256GB M.2 PCIe SSD hitting 2008 MB/s read, but only 23MB/s write. It would have taken nearly an hour to finish the benchmark, so we aborted it here as obviously something in AS SSD isn’t playing nice with this NVMe SSD or the native Microsoft NVMe drivers in Windows 8.1. The AS SSD Copy-Benchmark worked fine though and showed we were getting ISO speeds of 1505MB/s and the game test hit 1261MB/s!

Benchmark Results: For this benchmark chart you would ideally want to see a straight line as you don’t want any compression performance loss as the test goes from 0% compressible to 100% compressible data during the benchmark test period. The Samsung SM951 NVMe 256GB M.2 PCIe SSD was pretty smooth and topped out at 2020MB/s on Read and around 1200MB/s on the Write portion of the test.

PCMark 8 Storage Test

PCMark 8 is the latest version in Futuremark’s series of industry standard PC benchmarking tools. With PCMark 8 you can test the performance of all types of PC, from tablets to desktops. With five separate benchmark tests plus battery life testing, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance. PCMark 8 is the complete PC benchmark for home and business. We ran the storage benchmark test suite on the Samsung SM951 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD.

Benchmark Results: When it comes to PCMark 8 performance you are looking at an overall score of 4394 with a storage bandwidth score of 97.48MB/s, which is lower than we expected.

Update July 2nd, 2015:

Samsung sent us a new drive that contains an updated firmware that has some obvious changes in the way this particular NVMe drive handles Force Unit Access (FUA) I/O write commands. Our overall performance score shot up from 4394 to 5088 and the storage bandwidth score went from 97.48 MB/s to an impressive 616.76 MB/s. This is a huge performance increase!