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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

I have just built a PC with a M.2 Samsung 950 Pro on a Z170 motherboard (make sure you get the Z170 so the M.2 slot can use 4 PCI-E channels).

The performance of this thing is insane. Ars benchmarked it at 2600MB/s read, 1500MB/s write for sequential data[1]. Most SSDs benchmark at less than 600 MB/s[2].

By comparison, a RAM Disk gets ~6000MB/s on the https://hardforum.com/threads/quad-channel-ram-disk-benchmar... benchmark.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/950-pro-review-samsun...

[2] http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/samsung-850-evo-ssd-rev...

[3] https://hardforum.com/threads/quad-channel-ram-disk-benchmar...

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How many iops do you get when you test it with fio (http://linux.die.net/man/1/fio) ?

Example: sudo fio --filename=/home/olav/testfile --direct=1 --sync=1 --rw=read --bs=4k --numjobs=8 --iodepth=32 --runtime=60 --time_based --group_reporting --size=1G --name=journal-test

Not in-front of it now. Will try to remember to do this though.

Please do this, the IOPS are very important!

Anandtech's results may be applicable here too: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-revie...

For 4K random reads, you'll probably want more than 32 iodepth, even on a consumer drive like this. And you'll want to try to write to each offset in the drive beforehand in case they have a "return 0" shortcut (like many enterprise drives).

I have two of these in raid 0 in a Lenovo P70.

  fahad@heffalump:~/fiotest$  sudo fio --filename=$PWD/testfile --direct=1 --sync=1 --rw=read --bs=4k --numjobs=8 --iodepth=32 --runtime=60 --time_based --group_reporting --size=1G --name=journal-test
  journal-test: (g=0): rw=read, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=32
  ...
  fio-2.2.10
  Starting 8 processes
  journal-test: Laying out IO file(s) (1 file(s) / 1024MB)
  Jobs: 8 (f=8): [R(8)] [100.0% done] [367.8MB/0KB/0KB /s] [94.2K/0/0 iops] [eta 00m:00s]
  journal-test: (groupid=0, jobs=8): err= 0: pid=25184: Wed Jun  1 17:32:44 2016
    read : io=22265MB, bw=379986KB/s, iops=94996, runt= 60001msec
      clat (usec): min=15, max=19595, avg=83.59, stdev=102.01
       lat (usec): min=15, max=19595, avg=83.65, stdev=102.02
      clat percentiles (usec):
     |  1.00th=[   20],  5.00th=[   65], 10.00th=[   66], 20.00th=[   68],
       | 30.00th=[   75], 40.00th=[   79], 50.00th=[   80], 60.00th=[   82],
       | 70.00th=[   84], 80.00th=[   90], 90.00th=[   97], 95.00th=[  108],
       | 99.00th=[  141], 99.50th=[  173], 99.90th=[  900], 99.95th=[ 1704],
       | 99.99th=[ 4768]
      bw (KB  /s): min=43704, max=53976, per=12.51%, avg=47524.23, stdev=1225.35
      lat (usec) : 20=0.74%, 50=1.42%, 100=89.28%, 250=8.32%, 500=0.09%
      lat (usec) : 750=0.03%, 1000=0.03%
      lat (msec) : 2=0.06%, 4=0.02%, 10=0.01%, 20=0.01%
    cpu          : usr=1.38%, sys=7.92%, ctx=5737418, majf=0, minf=89
    IO depths    : 1=100.0%, 2=0.0%, 4=0.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
       submit    : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
       complete  : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
       issued    : total=r=5699889/w=0/d=0, short=r=0/w=0/d=0, drop=r=0/w=0/d=0
       latency   : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=32

  Run status group 0 (all jobs):
     READ: io=22265MB, aggrb=379986KB/s, minb=379986KB/s, maxb=379986KB/s, mint=60001msec, maxt=60001msec

That is awesome, what do you get with writes? (rw=write)

I ran both: https://gist.github.com/nlothian/e22ee30c6ccb8d473058d9e0864...

Read is a lot (LOT) faster than writes. Enough to make me thing I might have something misconfigurated there(?), although I'm not familiar enough with this benchmark to know for sure.

It's not unusual for write performance to be staggeringly worse than read on SSDs. It all depends how the controller is setup and how the manufacturer wants it to benchmark. Most sites emphasize read performance so the companies tune for it.

> I have just built a PC with a M.2 Samsung 950 Pro on a Z170 motherboard

Ditto - I built mine at the beginning of the year. It's very fast, but I learned two things that weren't widely reported at the time.

1) The chips on the drive get _very_ hot under use (thermal throttling kicks in at 75C). Even with minimal use they seem to have a running temp > 50C. I'm a little nervous about the long-term reliability of the drive based on the heat alone.

2) Boot speed with Windows is still fairly slow unless the drive is formatted to GPT (GUID Partitiion Table) instead of the default MBR. It's possible to do this when installing Windows, but there's no easy way to convert after installing

> I learned two things that weren't widely reported at the time.

For what it's worth, the Anandtech review [0] mentioned your first issue in their review back in October. Anandtech has missed things in the past, but I trust them a lot to find and point out possible issues with hardware.

[0] Linking to the last page 'Final Words' section as it is mentioned up front and centre there. A lot of times, I'll read or skim the first page, and jump directly to the final page conclusion for hardware I just want a quick overview of - http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-revie...

What operating system do you use? I am trying to install windows 7 on those exact specs (M.2 Samsung 950 Pro on Z170 motherboard, ASRock Extreme6+), and I'm having trouble getting it to either recognize the M.2 slot during install, or partition an alternate SATA Samsung 850 EVO SSD to clone from. Did you have similar difficulties?

My bet is 64bit Linux

Dis you change bios to ahci instead of ide for the disk?

Windows 7 can be a PITA in such cases. From what I've seen, Windows 7 has started to show its age when it comes to hardware. Quite a bit of modern hardware like NVMe SSDs and USB 3 are not recognized out of the box. You're most stable bet would be to go with Windows 10 if you can. There'll be tradeoffs which I guess you are already aware of.

I am guessing a flavor of Linux.

I attempted to install the exact same card (M.2 Samsung 950 Pro) into a NUC5I7RYH, as well as a backup SATA (Seagate 1TB Laptop Gaming SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive) SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 2.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST1000LM014)) - Neither one of them worked with Windows 7 out of the gate, and I ended spending a 4-6 hour odyssey of googling BIOS upgrades, Firmware Upgrades, and downloading various and sundry windows drivers (my final count was around 8-10 before all was said and done).

Ironically, we thought that Windows 7 would have had better support - but, as it turns out, for Circa 2H2015+ hardware, it's probably not a great platform. Here's hoping that Windows 10 stabilizes for a few years, and all the vendors agree to support that platform....

There is Windows update for 7/2008r2 which adds NVME support you need to cook it into the image.

Use this guide http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/guide-installing-win... It worked for me. Also this :) http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global/file/insight/201...

I have a windows 2008R2 box at home running on a 950pro.

Have you tried Windows 10 on it? Windows 7 is pretty old now and doesn't have much support for newer hardware. Your performance would be much better on Windows 10.

Windows 10 works well (M.2 Samsung 950 Pro on a Gigabyte GA-Z170X-UD5), but don't make the mistake I did of doing a default MBR-style format on the drive. Put the BIOS in UEFI mode and make sure the drive gets formatted with a GUID Partition Table (GPT).

With MBR the system would still take 30-60s to boot, but GPT reduced that to less than 10s.

You may need to copy the install data to a USB drive to get it to work. Initially I burned the iso image to a DVD and but then that DVD drive wasn't bootable under UEFI.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn336946.aspx

I used Ubuntu 16.04.

Windows 7 doesn't have M.2 drivers by default. See http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2817439/install-windo... and good luck! I believe Windows 10 is fine though.

ALL sata 3 SSDs should benchmark at 600MB/s or less, because 600MB/s is the maximum supported bandwidth throughput of SATA 6Gb/s

The 950 Pro (NVMe) uses PCIe x4, not SATA.

correct, i was replying to the sentence preceding source 2.

"Most SSDs benchmark at less than 600 MB/s[2]."

Which is why NVMe and M.2 are a thing now. SSDs have surpassed SATA (and in some cases, even SAS)

If you look at the post i was replying to, source two was a sata drive, and the claim was "most ssds cap out at 600MB/s"

of course they do, that is the theoretical limit of non pcie drives.

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