Samsung SSD On a Tiny M.2 Stick Is Capable of Read Speeds Over 2GB/sec 72
MojoKid writes: Samsung has just announced its new SM951-NVMe SSD, the industry's first NVMe SSD to employ an M.2 form-factor. Samsung says the new gumstick style drive is capable of sequential read and write speeds of 2,260 MB/sec and 1,600 MB/sec respectively. Comparable SATA-based M.2 SSDs typically can only push read/write speeds of 540 MB/sec and 500 MB/sec, while most standard PCIe versions muster just north of 1GB/sec. The Samsung SM951-NVMe's performance is actually very comparable to the Intel SSD 750 Series PCIe x4 card but should help kick notebook performance up a notch in this common platform configuration.
Re:Faster than DDR (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it is not in any sane measurement. This is linear-speed only. For random access, even the original DDR RAM will trash even these disks by a large margin.
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And yet, in terms of latency, DDR is still orders of magnitude faster.
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Seriously, find out the facts before posting BS. DDR has single word access times (and that is what counts) around 100ns. These drives have around 10...100us latency. A factor of 100...1000 is nowhere near comparable. What you are apparently unaware of is that DDR does not use any command queuing and has really small blocks, while the SSD uses, for memory, very large blocks and it only gets the 1.2GB/s because it knows about a whole set of future requests before it has to deliver them. That does not work fo
Has anyone waited 60 days? (Score:1)
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I've got an 840 EVO. There was a firmware bug that caused the performance to get really wonky after some time. I only realized it after running some HD diagnostics and getting really strange numbers that jumped all over the place. Things like 512kb chunks reading at 11mb/s and 1024kb chunks reading 520mb/s, while normally the speeds were fairly comparable.
Anyways, you need to get the tool from Samsung to correct this. First it has to update the drive's firmware and then it has to rewrite all the data on the
Re: Has anyone waited 60 days? (Score:1)
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Does the tool need to be run on MS just once (like a firmware flash), or is it a driver in the OS? If the former, I can probably slap Windows on briefly just to run the fix. If it has to be loaded and run... heck with that. Intel may not be perfect, but they are a good baseline of what SSD should be measured by.
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Don't Intel models just fail without warning and die on you?
Your turn.
It's fun this "let's pick a random complaint against a manufacturer based on one affected product over many years out of dozens that work just fine".
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Re:Apple already done did it (Score:5, Insightful)
Who do you think MAKES those M.2 SSDs in Apples? Hint: Samsung
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OS X 10.10.3 added NVME support for the new MacBook retina.
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No it's not. Apple does not support NVME so there are no NVME drives in any Apple products.
Not true. The 2015 Macbook uses an NVMe drive.
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No it's not. Apple does not support NVME so there are no NVME drives in any Apple products.
Yet....
Can we get systems with M.2 ports on the front? (Score:2)
So I can actually use M.2 drives like a flash drive? That would be awesome.
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I'm don't think M.2 can handle ESD and hotplugging, but Thunderbolt is essentially the external version of M.2.
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Thunderbolt and M.2 are alike in that they both have an implementation of PCI Express. They're otherwise rather dissimilar.
So, they're essentially PCI Express.
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Well, they both combine PCIe x4 and other common interfaces over a single electrical connector... they differ from an engineering standpoint, but for practical use TB is as close to an external M.2 as you'll find.
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No, not the same at all.
Thunderbolt has PCI Express and DisplayPort. It is used as an expansion bus for external peripherals.
M.2 has PCI Express and USB and SATA. It is used an an expansion bus for internal peripherals.
They're practically very dissimilar. Of the four electrical interfaces supported amongst them, they share just one in common. These aren't crazy words that only an engineer would understand.
I can't drive a DisplayPort monitor with M.2, and I can't connect a SATA drive to Thunderbolt.
SATA
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"I can't connect a SATA drive to Thunderbolt"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
1s and 0s are fucking 1s and 0s. All that matters is that the data gets where it needs to go and has adequate bandwidth with which to do so.
You could run a GPU off the M.2 slot. It's just a PCI-E 2.0 X2. You may not get the best performance obviously, but it would work. All it takes is the electrical contacts and data path and drivers.
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You mean PCI-E 3.0 x4, SATA 3.0, and/or USB 3.0. Native, with pins dedicated to those purposes. (There's currently 5 different M.2 card keyings standardized.)
Also, from your own link:
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Thunderbolt is dead. Apple was the only one to adopt it, and it was for only one generation. It's been replaced, for good or bad, for USB 3.
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Thunderbolt is dead. Apple was the only one to adopt it, and it was for only one generation. It's been replaced, for good or bad, for USB 3.
My 2015 Retina MacBook Pro says otherwise. Unless you mean that Thunderbolt was replaced with Thunderbolt 2, which is true.
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You could, but the connector is only rated for 60 matings.
Re:Can we get systems with M.2 ports on the front? (Score:5, Funny)
You could, but the connector is only rated for 60 matings.
60 matings is much better than most of the readers on slashdot will ever hope to achieve!
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And YOU just made my day :)
heat? (Score:2)
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As the M.2 drive sits on the PCI-E bus, it takes up PCI-E lanes. If you had 32 PCI-E lanes, you COULD have two GPUs on full 16x slots. Throw that M.2 in, well, now you've got 30 lanes, so at best, you're getting a 16X and 16x @ 8x lanes option. Remove the M.2 card, those lanes are free and you can run dual GPUs max throttle (assuming you've got CPUs that can keep up.)
Does that clarify things for you, some?
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If you put the SSD in, you've just throttled the system from being able to fully utilize two GPUs. Yes, the system will throttle. How you couldn't pull that away from my explanation is beyond me. M.2 PROVIDES 4x lanes PLUS SATA Express (which is another 2x lanes)
Multiple functions are supported for add-in cards, including the following device classes: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, satellite navigation, near field communication (NFC), digital radio, Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), wireless WAN (WWAN), and solid-state
M.2 Specification (Score:2)
Looking at the Wikipedia Article [wikipedia.org] and the images for the different pinouts for the M.2 Specification, I have serious concerns about the ability to inadvertently flipping the cards, and inserting them upside down. Take a look at the B vs M configuration, which is exactly a mirror of each other.
UNLESS there is part of the spec that I am not seeing about another notching somewhere, the ability to flip these over and inserting them wrong is going to be a huge issue. And looking at all the examples on the page,
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Take a look at the B vs M configuration, which is exactly a mirror of each other.
One is 6 pins wide, the other is 5 pins wide, so not exactly a mirror.
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So, you can't stick a 5 pin connector into a six pin hole?
And you have more faith in users than I do.
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So, you can't stick a 5 pin connector into a six pin hole?
No, because both also have a longer set of pins next to the 5 or 6 pins.
[n pins] [gap] [5 pins]
[6 pins] [gap] [n-1 pins]
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I have worked with people who could stick any object in any connector... they just had to get a big enough of a hammer. The most common I've encountered are VGA plugs into serial ports (which bend the pins in all directions.)
I am guessing that the people who designed this connector's configuration assumes it is not going to be user accessible for the post part, so they didn't really worry about it being 100% foolproof.
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so they didn't really worry about it being 100% foolproof.
Filed under "what could possibly go wrong"
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much needed!! (Score:4)
my work computer could really go for one of these; this kind of performance is needed to be able to grind through all the corporate security software.
"Just annouced" eh? (Score:3)
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The new MacBook supports NVMe on OS 10.10.3 [macrumors.com], so support is rapidly coming...
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Consumers are not going to notice much difference. (Score:3)
Well, nobody with a laptop is really going to notice much of a difference because frankly there isn't a whole lot of software that actually needs that kind of performance over the ~550 MBytes/sec that can already be obtained with SATA-III. Certainly not that would be run on a laptop anyway.
It's just using the PCI-e lanes on the M.2 connector instead of the SATA-III lanes. This isn't a magical technology. There's a loss of robustness and portability that gets traded off. It does point to SATA needing another few speed bumps, though. The fundamental serial link technology used at the physical level by PCI-e and SATA is almost identical. The main difference is that SATA is designed for cabling while M.2 is not (at least not M.2's PCI-e lanes).
-Matt
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There are plenty of people working with 4K video nowadays. Even "just" HD video. A lot of folks move a LOT of data with "just their laptop". It's a trend. "Specialized workstations" we only know because we're here, but the truth is, most people just don't want a PC anymore.
Want a shocker? A LOT of people are just not replacing their broken PC anymore. They're happy with what their phone or tablet can do. And if they do get a PC, it's almost always a laptop.
Only gamers care for "big rigs" nowadays.
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Indeed... my raw editing platform for HD video is a MBP -- and even with the new drives, the R/W is still the bottleneck (but just barely).
Any post production work goes onto beefier hardware, but for initial splicing and storyboarding of video, the MBP works quite well.
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The concept of a workstation has been pretty much marginalized due to things being "good enough". I might see one that is mainly to interact with a dedicated appliance (CNC mill), or perhaps a few workstations when working with definite tasks, but they tend to be bit players compared to desktops or laptops.
The desktop is becoming a role, as opposed to a device. For example, the Surface Pro when plugged into a dock functions as a desktop role. Same with most laptops.
As for laptops, they are nowhere near a
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Weren't workstations of the 80s and 90s just powerful microcomputers?
CPU with memory protection (e.g. 68010 plus MMU), SCSI disks, high resolution (about a megapixel), several megabytes of memory, advanced OS : Unix-like, Windows NT or something else.
By that measure, any good low end desktop computer is a workstation. By 2001, that had Windows XP and Ultra DMA IDE modes ; a decade or less later we had SATA with NCQ (no need for SCSI), support for dual monitor and SMP as standard (dual and quad core).
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That's a limitation of the Intel chipsets.
SATA Express lets you throw x lanes of PCIe y. That's the whole point of SATA Express instead of doing SATA 12 Gbps. SATA Express is scalable.
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There is a nice improvement going from AHCI to NVMe protocol, though. I/O gets lower latency, less CPU intensive, less "blocking".
That may seem "philosophical" still. At a first approximation latency is halved. The tech will be a good thing to have once the drives get plentiful and cheap.
I Want (Score:2)
I want a bootable PCIe 4.0 (or 3.0) x16 (or x8) card that gives me 4 (or 2) m.2 slots and a RAID controller.
Bonus points for passing through TRIM when possible (Intel does it with RAID 0 and RAID 1, I believe) and doing the OPAL/Bitlocker/whatever crypto passthrough so your OS can use the drive's built-in crypto instead of layering its own on top.
Alternatively, give me comparable NVMe SSDs with a PCIe connector instead of an m.2 connector, and give me a motherboard with a RAID controller connected to the PC
Not sure that TFA is comparing apples to apples (Score:4, Informative)
...is capable of sequential read and write speeds of 2,260 MB/sec and 1,600 MB/sec respectively. Comparable SATA-based M.2 SSDs typically can only push read/write speeds of 540 MB/sec and 500 MB/sec,
Non-SATA M.2 drives are already on the market. Comparing the newest drive to SATA-based M.2 drives does not help much, I'd rather see it compared to what it supersedes. In this case, I'm more interested in a comparison with a PCIe 3.0 4-lane M.2 SSD drive that doesn't support NVMe. The drive specification for the earlier non-NVMe SM951 is not that far off of that of the new drive. The earlier drive is rated at sequential read and write speeds of 2,150 MB/sec 1,500 MB/sec respectively. [anandtech.com] Again, not all that far off.
That being said...I'm curious to see the difference that NVMe makes in real-world benchmarks, and where the difference is...especially because I just built a new system with a non-NVMe SM951 SSD. :)