* Sequential performance measurements based on Crystal Disk Mark 5.0.2 and Random performance measurements based on Non-Operating: 1500G, duration 0.5m sec, 3 axis TRIM(Required OS support), Garbage Collection, S.M.A.R.T TCG Opal Family Spec and eDrive(IEEE1667) to be supported by FW update Windows 7 users also need to pre-install a driver, and while Windows 8 and 10 have a native NVMe driver, it’s recommended to use Samsung’s driver for optimal results. Thus far, official support on the desktop is primarily limited to Intel Z97/Z170/X99 boards and the latest AMD 990FX models. Additionally, in order to boot from it, the PC must support UEFI and have an NVMe-compatible BIOS. To use the 950 Pro, an M.2 slot connected via four PCI-E lanes (or via PCI-E x4 adapter card) is required to see its full benefits. Installed on our Asus Maximus VIII Gene test board. It utilizes the same Samsung UBX controller that drives the SM951, a high-end M.2 drive offered only on the OEM market, sports V-NAND MLC chips made of transistors arranged both vertically and horizontally to increase density, and 512MB of DDR3 cache. The new standard is supported by Samsung’s latest flagship SSD, the 950 Pro, which comes in capacities of 256GB and 512GB, packed in an M.2 2280 (22 mm wide, 80 mm long) form factor running on a PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface. The new standard takes better advantage of the nature of SSDs and their multiple internal memory channels, allowing for more/deeper command queues, improving support for multi-core processors, and lowering latency by more than half. The ancient Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) standard is still widely used for SSDs today, despite the fact it was designed with mechanical hard drives in mind. One note about the Predator is that it lacks support for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), a newer storage protocol standard developed specifically for PCI Express based drives. It displayed encouraging synthetic performance and took the top spot in our real world performance metrics, but it was only slightly faster than the previous champ, the Samsung 850 Pro, an old fashioned 2.5-inch SATA 6 Gbps model. Six months ago, we examined the Kingston HyperX Predator, an M.2 drive with a Marvell controller, 1GB of DDR3 cache, top-notch 19 nm Toggle-Mode NAND flash memory, and a PCI-E 2.0 x4 adapter card for users of older systems lacking M.2 support. Given the ample number of PCI-E lanes provided by Intel’s latest generation of CPUs, most Skylake LGA1151 motherboards support M.2 drives that can tap into four PCI Express 3.0 lanes rather than two, alleviating the restriction to an even greater degree. Like the mSATA models they replace, M.2 drives are considerably smaller than traditional 2.5-inch drives and they are connected via a PCI Express interface that allows them to surpass the bandwidth ceiling of SATA 6 Gbps, widely considered to be a bottleneck to high-end SSD performance. For the past few years, the M.2 SSD form factor has seen increasing support from notebook and motherboard manufacturers.
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