SM951 – my experience

After quite a bit of research, i have finally purchased a new system - along with a SM951 - 256GB version.

I wrote an article a while back about some of the difficulties of getting appropriate performance out of M2 drives - http://www.hayesjupe.com/finding-the-right-motherboard-for-the-samsung-xp941/

I ended up getting a MSI X99A SLI Plus motherboard which has m.2 x4 (a requirement) and the nice-ity of usb 3.1.

Long story short - the install of the SM951 was a breeze, slot it in, secure it using the "holding" screw - all done.

Interesting - the device does not show up in the BIOS - however, when installing the OS (8.1u1 in my case) the drive showed up without any issues. Even now with the system booting from the device - the BIOS still shows the slot as empty.

So... is it quick?... for benchmarks - check out sites like http://www.anandtech.com/show/8979/samsung-sm951-512-gb-review - yes its bloody quick on paper...

In "real world" usage - my OS now boots in 2 seconds instead of 8 (or so) - nice... but does it really increase productivity?... meh.

Playing games - meh. Loading times of the previous SSD were already fast - this is faster, but again, its a bit of a "meh" difference.

Virtual machines - now this is where it makes a big difference... using multiple VM's is now just lightning fast. Boot 5 VM's at once, they are all up in couple of seconds and disk intensive operations that previously took noticeably large amounts of time complete ludicrously quickly.

To sum up - an ultra-fast PCIE drive like this is definitely nice to have no matter what you do - but bang for buck, if your an "everyday" user or gamer, a SATA3 SSD probably delivers better value for money at this point in time. If you are doing lots of disk intensive work, such as virtual machines, SAS/sql/data import & analysis type work - then its a bit of a no-brainer. You will save enough time to warrant the purchase of this drive in one day.

By the way - this drive was purchased from - https://www.ramcity.com.au/buy/samsung-sm951-256gb-ahci-m.2-pcie-3.0-x4-80mm-ssd/MZHPV256HDGL-00000