Samsung’s 950 Pro M.2 SSD pairs NVMe with V-NAND for eye-popping performance
Consumer-ready drive hits sequential reads of 2500MB/s and writes of 1500MB/s.

Experience a next-generation SSD today

Equipped with the enhanced bandwidth of the NVMe interface, the 950 PRO is ideal for intensive workloads, such as computer-aided design, data analysis and engineering simulations. It outperforms SATA SSDs by over 4.5 times in sequential read and by over 2.5 times in sequential write, delivering the speeds of 2,500 MB/s and 1,500 MB/s respectively.*


The Samsung 950 Pro SSD—the follow up to the legendary Samsung 850 Pro SSD—has been unveiled by the company at its annual SSD summit in Seoul, Korea. The 950 Pro will be available at retail in October, with MSRPs of $199.99 (probably ~£150) for the 256GB version, and $349.99 (~£280) for the 512GB version. UK pricing is yet to be confirmed.

Based on Samsung's V-NAND technology and available in 512GB and 256GB capacities, the 950 Pro shuns the common 2.5-inch form factor and SATA interface for cutting-edge M.2 2280 and PCIe 3.0 x4. It also makes use of the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface, better known as NVMe.

Most SSDs still make use of the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) architecture, which was originally developed for spinning platter SATA hard drives back in 2004. While AHCI works fine for traditional hard drives, it was never designed for low latency NAND chips. As flash speeds have increased, AHCI has become a performance bottleneck. NVMe exploits both the PCIe bus and NAND flash memory to offer higher performance and lower latency.


In the case of the 512GB Samsung 950 Pro, the combination of NVMe, speedy V-NAND chips, and a triple core, eight-channel UBX controller has resulted in some eye-popping performance. Sequential read speeds top out at 2500MB/s, while sequential writes hit 1500MB/s. By comparison, Samsung's OEM-only SM951 AHCI drive—which is based on the same UBX controller, albeit paired with planar NAND—tops out at 2150MB/s sequential reads and 1500MB/s sequential writes.

Random read performance on the 512GB 950 Pro is up to 300K IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), with write speeds of up to 110K IOPS. Power tops out 5.7W on average, 7.0W in burst mode, and 1.7W at idle. The drive also features 512MB of DRAM memory, and support for 256-bit AES encryption. A future firmware update also promises to add TCG Opal support for Microsoft's eDrive standard.

Because the 950 Pro is a consumer drive—unlike the OEM-only SM951—Samsung is bundling it with its own proprietary NVMe driver, although, it will also be compatible with the standard driver available for Windows 7 and up. Both drives ship with a five year limited warranty covering up to 200 TBW (terabytes written) for the 256GB and 400 TBW on the 512GB, which is strangely less than 10 year warranty of the 850 Pro.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...nvme-with-v-nand-for-eye-popping-performance/

Shedding light on a whole new standard of capacity and performance.
Samsung V-NAND technology overcomes the capacity limitations of traditional 2D NAND technology with its revolutionary vertical design.
V-NAND also applies innovative Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology which prevents data corruption caused by cell-to-cell interference.
The synergy of both structural and material innovations leads to improved speed, power efficiency, and endurance.

Vertical expansion breaks through horizontal limit.

Samsung revolutionized the storage industry by shifting the planar NAND to a vertical structure. Samsung V-NAND technology features a unique design that stacks 48 layers on top of one another instead of trying to decrease the cells’ pitch size. Samsung used Channel Hole Technology (CHT) to enable cells to connect vertically with one another through a cylindrical channel that runs through stacked cells.

Material innovation that no one can match.

Samsung has shifted the paradigm of material used for NAND. Samsung applies the innovative CTF technology which uses a non-conductive layer of Silicon Nitride (SiN), temporarily trapping electrical charges to maintain cell integrity.

This non-conductive layer wraps around the control gate of the cell, acting as an insulator that holds charges to prevent data corruption caused by cell-to-cell interference.


Vertical architecture paves the way for amplified capacity.

Layering cells vertically in three-dimensional stacks provides much greater cell density. Samsung V-NAND technology lets heavy-workload users and data centers store and handle more data with greatly improved capacity.

Samsung V-NAND enables up to 100 layers of cells to be stacked with the potential to scale the density up to 1 Terabit. The 2D planar NAND density ceiling can only reach the minimum density of V-NAND.

Innovative algorithms equal faster performance

Traditional planar NAND memory requires the creation of sets of complex program algorithms to prevent data corruption caused by cell-to-cell interference. However, Samsung V-NAND is virtually immune to cell-to-cell interference.

V-NAND does not need to go through a complex program algorithm to write data, and this enables the memory to write data up to two times faster than traditional 2D planar NAND flash memory.

Unprecedented power efficiency

Since V-NAND technology has eliminated the issue of cell-to-cell interference, its programming steps are greatly reduced. As a result, power consumption is substantially lowered by up to 45 percent compared to planar NAND memory.


Embedded high endurance to store your valuable data

Samsung V-NAND provides up to twice the endurance of planar NAND. V-NAND decreases its electric field because its cells are slightly larger, and employs CTF-based insulators eliminating the risk of cell-to-cell interference, resulting in superior retention performance.

In comparison between 3-bit and 2-bit, Samsung 3-bit V-NAND shows endurance similar to that of 2-bit planar NAND, and even better performance in heavy workloads. V-NAND also shows a sustained P/E cycle for longer periods of time.

More details at: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/ssd950pro/vnand.html

 

$349.99 for the 512GB version is a pretty... fair price considering the ludicrous performance of this beast. Fuck, I can't wait to shove one of those in my PC

 

That's some nifty drive ideas them folk out there at Samsung got goin' on. Zippidy doo do da, zippidy fuckin' aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Faster than greased lightnin' after 5 cups of coffee.

 

When drives evolute from mechanical to digital domain they start to follow the Murphys law, every 2 years processing double with same price of the old one... Soon no one will cry that a kontakt library is unplayable.

 

that would be Moore's Law. :D

 

What are you talking about ??

Lookstu hier: http://geizhals.de/sandisk-fusion-i...aadmod-5t12-sf1-a1205800.html?hloc=at&hloc=de

 

There needs to be larger SSDs of this speed. HDD can be used to raid0 or mirroring, but SSDs should be whats used for primary computing and program running. And they make this 'vertical' tech sound different than platters in a layered HDD.

 

This won't happen anytime soon.

In fact, you don't need huge SSDs. A four-drive HDD RAID array is absolutely fine for any audio library you throw at it or more. Most drives can hit 150+ Mbyte/sec sequential transfers (almost quadruple that with a nice RAID) and with 64 gigs of RAM quickly becoming the norm and using Kontakt Memory Server, it's not a huge difference from SSD performance.

Most stuff on the library HDDs isn't being constantly accessed. So it's fine to work with a RAID0 or RAID10 library storage. I've yet to see a buffer underrun even under very heavy projects with multiple multichannel Kontakts or VEP nodes.