Samsung SSD 950 PRO 512GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD Review

The SSD Benchmark Test System

Before we look at the numbers, lets take a brief look at the test system that was used. All testing was done on a fresh install of Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit and benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running. This means windows defender, windows update, disk fragmentation and everything else that would interfere with testing was disabled. Windows 8.1 also had the power option set to high performance. We also disabled Turbo mode on the Intel Core i7-5960X to ensure our numbers are spot on and repeatable.

The Intel X99 platform that we used to test the M.2 PCIe SSD was based around the ASUS X99 Sabertooth motherboard with BIOS 1801 that came out on 06/25/2015. We used Intel RST storage drivers, the exact version was 13.1.0.1058. The Crucial Ballistix DDR4 32GB 2400MHz memory kit was run at 2666MHz with 15-15-15-28 1T memory timings. The Corsair Neutron XT 240GB SSD was used as the primary drive.

Intel X99 Test Bench

Intel LGA 2011v3 Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model	Live Pricing
Processor	Core i7 5960X	Click Here
Motherboard	ASUSX99 Sabertooth	Click Here
Memory	Crucial Ballistix 2400MHz 32GB	Click Here
OS Drive	Corsair Neutron XT 240GB	Click Here
Power Supply	Corsair AX860i	Click Here
Operating System	Windows 8.1 Pro 64-Bit	Click Here

We downloaded the latest version of Samsung Magician and the drive was detected just fine and showed that the firmware version that we are running at the time of testing and it was 1B0QBXX7.

We ran the quick test and it showed the Samsung SSD 950 Pro 512GB SSD had sequential read/write performance of 2601/1542MB/s and a Random Read/Write of 173,328/104,562 IOPS. The sequential performance numbers are close to the drives rated speeds, but the Random read operations was half of the 300,000 IOPS that the drive is rated for.

The overall capacity of the Samsung SSD 950 Pro 512GB drive shows up as 476 GB in Windows.

Let’s have a look at the performance!