Samsung 960 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD Review (2TB) – Breathtaking Speed

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER

We also wanted to see how performance was in a real world use when transferring large files to the SSD. For this test we are going to simply stress write performance by transferring over a 30GB folder of movies off of a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro to the test SSDs and time how long it takes. Once complete we can calculate the average speed.

In this test the Samsung 960 Pro was actually bottlenecked by the data we were feeding it, thus our performance results do not align with the rated spec of over 2GB/s. This, however, does bring to light that it is so fast, that some who need high speed for multimedia editing may not even be able to utilize all 960 Pro’s performance. 1-3GB movie files basically move instantly. Only when you have larger raw files will you notice any wait time…and even then it is extremely short.

POWER CONSUMPTION

For our power consumption testing, we have the drive connected to the system as a secondary drive. To record the wattage, we are now utilizing a Quarch Technology Programmable Power Module. It allows us to accurately measure power consumption over time and is flexible enough to allow us to test any SSD that comes our way.

Our power analysis may change as time goes on, but for now we are looking at just a few metrics with the main goal of measuring our results against the manufacturer’s ratings. Because most consumer systems are at idle for about 80% of the time, idle power consumption is an important measure to look at when understanding the efficiency of a drive.

In the chart above we have the idle power consumption of many of the latest NVMe SSDs with the default power settings in our system’s UEFI. Unless you are able to tweak anything yourself, this is what you will be seeing as well. As you can see, compared to a SATA SSD with power link management enabled, these PCIe SSDs can consume a lot of power at idle, but in comparison to one another, the 960 Pro shows to consume the least.

POWER EFFICIENCY

Finally, we wanted to post up a graph of the power efficiency of the SSDs in comparison. We are looking at MB/s per Watt in this graph. The higher the result, the better.

Here we can see that yet again the 960 Pro takes the lead over the competition and surpasses its predecessor. None of the other PCIe SSDs even come close. As you can see, the Intel 750 400GB is even a power hog compared to the M.2 SSDs, although the HyperX Predator isn’t too great either in this metric.