Samsung 950 PRO vs SM951

@Cloudfire @tilleroftheearth @octiceps

I ordered a new lappy and I chose two Samsung 950 PRO M2 NVME 512GB SSDs in RAID 0

The other option they had was the Samsung SM951 NVME M2 SSD but I choose the Samsung 950 PRO as its newer and from the specs on the whitepaper seems a tad faster. Did I make the right choice choosing it over the SM951?

I just saw the review, it's a mixed bag of results I don't know what to make of this.

Please also check the performance consistency it doesn't make any sense, the SM951 256GB blows everything else out of the water by a large fraction whilst even the SM951 512GB is nowhere near as close:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-review-256gb-512gb/6

 

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...erforming-as-advertised.783057/#post-10119847

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...erforming-as-advertised.783057/#post-10120015

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ing-as-advertised.783057/page-2#post-10122189

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ing-as-advertised.783057/page-2#post-10122448


Did you make the right choice over the OEM SM951 - probably.

But what I make of this steaming pile of ss is that M.2 is not all it's cracked up to be, by a long shot.

I don't give a minutes thought of what might be. I care about what is. NVMe isn't (yet; at least for a notebook platform).

 

I would say M.2 is not all it's cracked up to be - but m.2 nvme IS( read : pcie x4 lanes) . Latency and command queuing are two areas where a lot of people really needed better drives, and nvme delivers. With the reduced complexity and more streamlined storage stack latency is greatly reduced over ahci + don't forget that support for multiple command queues "ensures that the CPU can be used to its full potential and that the IOPS is not bottlenecked by single core limitation." , to quote Anandtech.
Now what I find people REALLY are discussing is often real world scenarios of mixed read/write workloads, especially working with small files. In that department there is room for improvement. You could push that argument all the way to steady state perfomance, but then you already have the option of buying yourself a super expensive sata or pcie enterprise drive don't you ? Or a less expensive sata enterprise one ? Good NAND is not cheap. You really can't expect the stars would be my sentiment. You already got the moon with these drives.