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Samsung V-NAND SSD 950 Pro Review a Hardware Reviews at MMORPG.com
BillMurphy
Former Managing EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 4,565
Samsung V-NAND SSD 950 Pro Review a Hardware Reviews at MMORPG.com
SSDs are no longer the future of storage when it comes to consumer computing. They’re the present. The problem is that SATA drives have their limitations in speed, and to solve that problem, Samsung has recently released the V-NAND 950 Pro SSD… a solid state drive that uses the PCE Express 3.0 x4 connection with the NVMe protocol. In short? Its speeds are about five times what was possible with the 850 Pro.
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Comments
There's definitely something amiss with your benchmarks. No game should have a Samsung 850 Pro going all out for 30 seconds to load it. If SATA is the bottleneck, that's enough time to load 15 GB off of an SSD, which would generally mean the game uses quite a bit more memory than that.
If you tried loading the game from the 850 first, then again from the 950, stuff may have been cached in memory so that it didn't actually reload. Alternatively, you might have really screwed up your 850 somehow, such as if it's mostly full, severely fragmented, or getting hammered by other programs, giving it artificially slow results.
I agree with this. Techreport.com and PCGamer.com have both done loading time test on games and they didn't get any significant difference between Samsung 950 Pro and 850 Pro
http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/4
http://www.pcgamer.com/samsung-ssd-950-pro-review/
EDIT: Though if all the games you selected do perform some kind of scan for data integrity and/or updates before starting, Samsung 950 Pro might be fast enough to get that much advantage during such a scan.
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That could be possible, actually. My 850 is pretty full and old to boot.
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Folks at gen 5 and 6 already have setups where CPUs house up to 40 PCIe lanes (for SLI/xfire) still having room for these new M.2 SSDs for desktops.
For my poor old rig it would mean my single GPU card would need to "downgrade" to 8x PCIe mode in order to release the lanes for 1 or 2 M.2s running in other slots.
Those SSDs are still too expensive to still have long loading times IMO.
Not sure exactly how the test was run, but I only see the Elin school girl ninja for like 5 or 6 seconds at best. When Ramcache kicks in it is less than a second.. if I see her at all.
Did you have all the PCIe lanes it needs? easy to miss if you have odd things in pci slots or didn't check settings.
As far as price goes M.2 should be cheaper; already is in the case of e.g. Intel. Samsung - more expensive than some, cheaper than others.
Source (Dutch):
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/111357/samsung-software-stelt-update-afhankelijk-van-toestemming-voor-dataverzameling.html
FYI
As for storing games on it? Depends a lot on the game in question. Some games benefit a lot and some games don't really benefit at all.
Take something like World of Warships as an example. It doesn't take long at all to load from my slow WD Red HHD to begin with and although the SSD would load the assets required for a match in no time flat, since you have to wait for the match count down anyway, it's a complete waste of precious space.
Then there's something like World of Warcraft. It's blazingly fast to load compared to a HDD, but once you're in the game, it doesn't make a huge difference. Sure, instances load faster and such, but you get the same problem as in World of Warships - you still have to wait for the rest of your party. It's great if you often hop in and out of the game or change alts a lot, but if you're the kind of person who logs in for 8 hours in a row on the same character, you're better off just getting a cheap SSD (if you don't have one already) which still makes a huge difference compared to a HDD.
All in all, if money is not an issue and you got a motherboard that supports it, then by all means get one. You WILL notice a difference over a SATA SSD. If money is an issue or you would have to upgrade your motherboard in order to run it, then don't bother to be honest. It's great, but as good as it is, it's not THAT great. Going from a HDD to a SATA SSD made more of a difference to me than going from a SATA SSD to a PCIe SSD in my world. Anyone building a new system today should include a SSD, but if you're on a budget, don't waste in on this. Spend that money on a better GPU or a bigger SSD if you jump between a lot of games. After all, what good is shaving 10-20 seconds off here and there going to do you if you constantly have to uninstall and reinstall games? Yeah, 512GB might seem like much, but it fills up surprisingly fast!
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As to the drive, I have a 500 sata based Samsung SDD and a pci based Samsung 250. As some people mentioned above I have noticed the pci based SSD steals cycles from my other pci devices. i.e the graphics card. I think I need a better motherboard to really use it. While the pci version is a bit faster, it is definitely not 5 times faster.
A LOT of users already have "older" SATA SSDs, and are thinking "is it really worth upgrading? what benefit will I get for my money?" (as a replacing an old already-used SSD with a brand new NVMe one), and tables like that answer the question perfectly.
Bill, very useful article imo! Keep them coming!