Intel 600p vs. Samsung 950 Pro

[biostud]

The intel 600p seems like a fluke.

Consider this value nvme SSD: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mydigitalssd-bpx-nvme-ssd,4780.html

960 EVO 500 GB review: http://www.ocaholic.co.uk/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=4032&960EVO=

 

[UsandThem]

960 EVO 500 GB review: http://www.ocaholic.co.uk/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=4032&960EVO=

Thanks for posting!

Not the most detailed review, but that's all that is out there right now. However, those Iometer numbers look very impressive.

I have seen several reviews for the 960 Pro (Anandtech, Toms, Tech Report, SSD Review, Ars), but there must be a NDA period on the 960 EVO benchmarks being published. Anybody know when that ends?

 

[RussianSensation]

RS, the 600p seems to be around the same speed, and same price, as an 850 EVO, what's not to like about it?

Read the reviews. There are many other tests other than the ones I linked which show the poor performance of the 600p.

"The Intel 600p is the first drive in this segment with TLC NAND. Since it uses Intel's 3D TLC NAND flash rather than planar TLC, the 600p is able to perform respectably, but it is not in the same league as the MLC-based competition. On light workloads the 600p is able to outperform any SATA SSD including the Samsung 850 Pro, but under pressure of a full drive or sustained writes it loses almost all of the advantage of using PCIe and NVMe and performs worse than the Samsung 850 EVO."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds

I bought a pair of 850 Evo 500GB for $150 USD for a couple friends more than 1.5 years ago. Right now the 600p looks reasonable against the 850 Evo because the 850 Evo is old, slow and overpriced. When the 960 EVO 500GB costs $249, there is no way the 850 EVO 500GB is worth $150+. Since Samsung has little to no competition for the 850 Evo in the SATA 3 space, it's able to keep the prices high. We have to be careful here because now DDR3 memory costs as much if not more than DDR4 memory despite being slower since those who need legacy DDR3 will pay a premium since it's still cheaper to upgrade their existing desktop/notebook with DDR3 than to buy a new computer/platform. As a result, unless Samsung or Crucial or Mushkin bring out newer generation of larger SATA 3 drives, then SATA 3 drives will continue to be overpriced which suddenly makes the 600p look reasonable compared to them. The M.2 NVMe PCIe segment is moving much much faster. You also have to look at just how fast the 960 Evo and 960 Pro are relative to the top drives in the world to see just how good of a value they are.

The 960 Pro 1TB and 2TB SSDs make Intel's 750 1.2TB SSD look overpriced. From what I've seen, Optane is going to cost an arm and a leg for small capacity too.

Um, it is always kinda funny when close to 3x is actually less than. 512GB 600p is rated at 288 TBW. Last I checked, 288 > 200.

Must have been a spec mistake on early batches of 600p boxes or the author made a mistake:

"All four Intel 600p SSDs boast the same five-year warranty along with the same 72-terabyte TBW endurance rating, which is unusual and we would typically expect the larger models to have a higher rating."
http://www.techspot.com/review/1254-intel-ssd-600p/

I see that on Intel's website, they do list 288TB. That's a lot better. Still, it doesn't suddenly reverse the awfully inconsistent performance of the 600p series. The inconsistent performance of 600p series already showed up in the SSD User Benchmark scores where it's not even as good as the 850 Evo:

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compar...-600p-Series-NVMe-PCIe-M2-512GB/3477vsm168978

Intel is using a Silicon Motion controller on the 600p series:

"UPDATE: Allyn Malventano at PC Perspective has uncovered a forum post with an uncensored picture of the 600p. The controller has "SMI" in big letters, suggesting that it is a Silicon Motion SM2260 or relative thereof"

As I said, 600p should not be put with the 950Pro, 960 Evo and 960 Pro in the same performance category. Other than synthetic sequential scores, it's far behind:

The real world performance of the 600p is much closer to the SATA 3 drives than it is to the NVMe PCIe TLC/MLC drives. Therefore, I don't understand why someone who would want the performance of NVMe would even cross-shop the 600p with Samsung 950Pro/960Evo/960Pro. It doesn't make sense.

Triple PCI-E x4 3.0 RAID-0 SSDs sounds pretty spiffy, except, if you take a better look, wouldn't it just be better to get a bigger SSD, and connect it via PCI-E x8 3.0 or x16 3.0 in the first place?

I am not recommending triple-RAID. I am saying that there are Z170 boards with 2-3 M.2 slots, and such boards have extra optional features such as dual and triple raid. This in response to the comment above that it's a hassle to swap M.2 drives. It's not necessary to swap M.2 drives if one buys a board with multiple M.2 drives in the first place. My point was that MSI, Asrock and Gigabyte have offered these features in their $150-170 boards for at least a year. Unfortunately, most PC gamers blindly continue to buy Asus boards and then later on when they realize there are certain features they would have benefited from, those low-end and mid-range Asus boards don't have them compared to the competition. Typical of Asus motherboards.

On the plus side, the new Pascal cards really give second thoughts about bothering with 2x SLI, so a person might incline toward a PCI-E NVMe card or adapter.

Depends on what SLI setup we are talking about. GTX1070 SLI still superior value to both GTX1080 and Titan XP, that is until a $700-850 1080Ti GP102 shows up and makes 1070 SLI irrelevant. Right now $760 1070 SLI setup wipes the floor with a GTX1080 and often ties or beats the $1200 Titan XP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRnvGbK1Ops
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-asus-strix-gtx-1070-1080-o8g-sli-review

or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUet375VZbk

The SLI haters have either not used SLI in years or unrealistically expect 100% scaling in all AAA titles on launch date from the extra videocard. That is not how CF/SLI have ever worked. The point of SLI is to try to find a setup that costs less but on average provides a substantially superior gaming experience, while hwen SLI doesn't work, the slightly faster single card barely provides a superior gaming experience. The SLI setups that fall exactly into this category are 570 SLI vs. 580, 670 SLI vs. 680, 970 SLI vs. 980 and today 1070 SLI vs. 1080. Of course if gaming only at 1080p 60Hz, then SLI is a waste due to major CPU bottlenecks.

BTW, even if your board doesn't support multiple M.2 ports, you can still run multiple M.2 drives via PCIe adapters:

$24

Too bad that deal involves DEFRAUDING Samsung, by posing as an employee.

Do you try to get in on Armed Forces-only deals too?

*shakes head*

You can get 10% off as any New Customer by just logging into the Samsung website. That would make the 960 Evo a $224 drive + tax with a free $50+ game. Even if the game is resold for $30, that will make the drive around $224 * 1.06 - $30 = $207.55

MicroCenter has the 600p for $140 * 1.06 tax = $148.40

For the majority of consumers who do not have MicroCenter, Newegg sells 600P for $175, Amazon for $180.

The 960 Evo gets Samsung Magician and 22GB of SLC fast cache - which is probably enough for most game and program installs without it overflowing the cache. With such small price differences, the Samsung 960 drives are a better deal. If someone plans on filling up the drive and writing a lot of data or recording content on it, the 960 Pro will simply obliterate the 600p.

Thanks for posting!

With your GTX970, you'd benefit more from a GPU upgrade than PCIe NVMe SSD. Just something to think about if you plan on spending $200+ on a system upgrade part.

 

[UsandThem]

With your GTX970, you'd benefit more from a GPU upgrade than PCIe NVMe SSD. Just something to think about if you plan on spending $200+ on a system upgrade part.

Thanks for the advice, but I bought the GTX 970 when it was a deal too good to pass up a while back. I'm not a big gamer anymore (I still play a little Civilization games here and there), but I am way more into my music collection, photo, and video editing. Not a professional or anything like that, but just messing around with family videos and RAW photos and such from vacations, school functions, etc.

The video card should last me really until it dies (1080 monitor with no near-future plans on going to a higher resolution). Even the new Civ 6 game (if I decide to get it), looks like it runs great on a GTX 970.

 

[RussianSensation]

Not the most detailed review, but that's all that is out there right now. However, those Iometer numbers look very impressive.

The iometer leap from 950 Pro series is amazing, >3x the write performance over the 950 Pro 512GB and > 4X the increase over the 950 Pro 256GB. I wish CPUs/GPUs were improving this fast

The Pro line shines for 4K or 8K video recording but real world usage will hardly differ between the 960 Evo and 960 Pro

"But the performance of the 960 Pro just isn't felt in the vast majority of normal computing situations. Existing SSD drives already boot Windows, load games, and perform the background data movements required for all manner of other intense processing so fast that more often than not they're not the bottleneck. Combined with the high price of entry— thanks in part to 512GB being the minimum capacity—and you have a situation where the 960 Pro goes beyond being an aspirational product for normal consumers. It's like aspiring to buy an Nvidia Quadro card to play games: it just doesn't make sense.

For those that don’t have money to burn and don't explicitly need the performance these drives provide—i.e. anyone that isn’t using these drives for hugely intensive and critical workloads like 4K or 8K video editing—then it's worth thinking about cheaper alternatives. There are drives from likes of OCZ and Kingston that offer great performance for less cash, and of course there's Samsung's own upcoming Evo drive."
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/20...-review-the-fastest-consumer-ssd-you-can-buy/

That's why for me I don't understand cross-shopping the standard SATA3/600p and 960Evo/Pro drives. If someone wants as much space as possible but doesn't want mechanical HDDs anymore, get the cheaper SATA 3 drives. If someone wants a fast storage drive and will do a lot of writing and 4K-8K content recording/capturing, the 950Pro/960Evo and especially 960 Pro are on another level.

I'm not a big gamer anymore (I still play a little Civilization games here and there), but I am way more into my music collection, photo, and video editing.

From what I gather, the pro is hugely beneficial for a content creator, say if recording 4K (or greater) content in real time. Techno-Kitchen's editor (a Russia YouTube hardware review site) mentioned that 4K content video capture with an SSD that has less than 500MB/sec writes is not fast enough. He says in his real world testing he needed 600MB/sec for it to work [For example, if playing a game at 4K 60 fps and recording it with a capture card].

If you are going to be extracting, copying a lot of incompressible data and writing a lot of files across the same NVMe SSD, then the 960 series is going to be miles ahead of the 600p:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9nAA2YALV4

The problem is that prices are still high for the capacity on offer, and as consumers we are paying the early adopter premium for these fast drives. There are obviously diminishing returns when moving from something like an 850 Evo to the NVMe. It was mechanical drives with 5400-7200 rpms that were real dogs haha.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You also have to look at just how fast the 960 Evo and 960 Pro are relative to the top drives in the world to see just how good of a value they are.

IF your workload allows them to realize their potential performance. There have been MANY people on these very forums, who posted a thread, along the lines of "I just upgraded to a 950 Pro, why isn't my PC faster?".

Truth be told, the vast majority of consumer workloads aren't going to allow the 960 Pro / EVO M.2 drive to stretch its legs, not even to mention the existing 950 Pro. Spending $250 on a 500GB 960 Evo, just for "benchmark bragging rights", when a $150 500GB 850 EVO SATA6G would do for the workload, is simply wasted money. Even with your 10% off deal.

It's kind of like recommending a Titan XP video card, to someone that just web browses and wants to watch videos. Surely, you can realize that's a poor recommendation. Just like recommending everyone purchase a 960 Pro / EVO, if they are interested in an SSD.

Sure, maybe if they do video editing, or run a database server. But consumer workloads? What a waste of money.

 

[VirtualLarry]

As I said, 600p should not be put with the 950Pro, 960 Evo and 960 Pro in the same performance category. Other than synthetic sequential scores, it's far behind

I could say the very same thing about my Samsung SM951 M.2 AHCI PCI-E 128GB SSD. Synthetic sequential read is like 2000MB/s, and write is like 600MB/sec. But 4K QD32 read under CDM, is around 255MB/sec. Within the range of a decent-quality SATA6G SSD.

So Samsung's not all that, either.

Edit: I'm not saying that the 960 Pro / EVO aren't worth it, for someone that has an I/O intensive workload, or someone who wants "benchmark bragging rights", nor am I saying that they aren't an improvement in the M.2 SSD space, nor am I saying that they aren't faster than a 600p, clearly, they are.

But that doesn't mean that the 600p isn't a good buy, for those on a budget, that want a PCI-E M.2 SSD. It's at least as good as an 850 EVO, and not really more expensive, so it's a no-brainer, really, if you want an M.2 SSD and your mobo supports it. At least, that's how I feel.

And the poor write performance, when the SLC cache is exhausted, because it has to write only to the SLC cache and not directly to the NAND, and copies everything over, will hopefully get fixed with a firmware update.

 

[coercitiv]

But that doesn't mean that the 600p isn't a good buy, for those on a budget, that want a PCI-E M.2 SSD.

Those on a budget will buy cheaper drives: why spend almost 2x more on Intel 600p when you can buy Crucial MX300 and enjoy decent budget performance anyway. And before you mention it, most motherboards support both SATA/NVMe, so compatibility isn't an issue either.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Truth be told, the vast majority of consumer workloads aren't going to allow the 960 Pro / EVO M.2 drive to stretch its legs, not even to mention the existing 950 Pro. Spending $250 on a 500GB 960 Evo, just for "benchmark bragging rights", when a $150 500GB 850 EVO SATA6G would do for the workload, is simply wasted money. Even with your 10% off deal.

Well put. Cost is a major factor. I don't really have a good feel for US pricing but here the NVMe 600p only carries a very small premium compared to SATA drives. The same money*1 that'll buy you a ~500GB SATA drive will just about buy you a 250GB 960EVO*2 (when released), and since the 960PRO*3 is only available in 500GB+ versions the cost to entry is over 100% higher then a 500GB SATA drive.

So from a cost/capacity/performance the 600p doesn't look all that bad actually.

*1 ~1000DKK/US$148
*2 ~1100DKK/US$162
*3 ~2800DKK/US$414

 

[biostud]

From the Toms review:

The MyDigitalSSD BPX SSD is the current entry-level NVMe SSD market leader. It matches the Intel 600p's pricing while delivering nearly the same performance as the higher-priced Patriot Hellfire M.2. The gap between the two Phison E7 products closes in the smaller 256GB-class capacity, but the real story is how close all of the MLC-based 256GB class drives are regardless of price. We found more performance variation in the larger 512GB-class products, but the MyDigitalSSD, with its aggressive pricing, still delivered more performance-per-dollar than any other product in our test pool.

Amazon:
480Gb ~$200
240Gb ~$114
120 ~$70

So why buy the 600p?

 

[DesiPower]

Never heard of MyDigitalSSD before, for OS drives reliability is a major factor? Is its a Chinese company? Saw on their site that it can be preordered, will be shipped mid-nov.

Speaking of preorders, 960 EVO can be preordered too on Samsung site, ship date is mid Dec.

BTW, does size still matter? I remember back in the days, there was a significant difference in speed between 120GB vs 500GB, is that still the case?

 

[biostud]

Never heard of MyDigitalSSD before, for OS drives reliability is a major factor? Is its a Chinese company? Saw on their site that it can be preordered, will be shipped mid-nov.

Speaking of preorders, 960 EVO can be preordered too on Samsung site, ship date is mid Dec.

BTW, does size still matter? I remember back in the days, there was a significant difference in speed between 120GB vs 500GB, is that still the case?

Yes, speed increases with size, usually tops out with 512gb or 1tb drives.

 

[PliotronX]

MDSSD has been around for a long time and has consistently assembled some of the better bang for the buck drives. I have been happy with their products but have never had to deal with their support so I cannot vouch for their service abilities

 

[BonzaiDuck]

IF your workload allows them to realize their potential performance. There have been MANY people on these very forums, who posted a thread, along the lines of "I just upgraded to a 950 Pro, why isn't my PC faster?".

Truth be told, the vast majority of consumer workloads aren't going to allow the 960 Pro / EVO M.2 drive to stretch its legs, not even to mention the existing 950 Pro. Spending $250 on a 500GB 960 Evo, just for "benchmark bragging rights", when a $150 500GB 850 EVO SATA6G would do for the workload, is simply wasted money. Even with your 10% off deal.

It's kind of like recommending a Titan XP video card, to someone that just web browses and wants to watch videos. Surely, you can realize that's a poor recommendation. Just like recommending everyone purchase a 960 Pro / EVO, if they are interested in an SSD.

Sure, maybe if they do video editing, or run a database server. But consumer workloads? What a waste of money.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't question anything you say with this. But whether the 600P is a good buy, or the 960 Pro is a useful purpose would be decided by the usage. And while I totally agree with that, there is one other thing I want to try that few have considered, and you know what it is from a another thread, if not this one.

If the sustained read and write specs of an M.2 NVMe card are four or five times those of an SATA SSD, I can see that I might not want a 1TB M.2 for what I have in mind. a 500GB would still almost be too much.

In my configuration, you'd never see the NVMe drive in Explorer, and it would only appear in "Computer Management-> Disk management" as a healthy drive with an unknown format and no drive label.

Whether the benchies prove anything, though, I can imagine connecting a 2, 3, or 4TB spinner to the system, and for the allocation of only a couple GB RAM and the NVMe, you would see the benchies rise to ridiculous levels.

To those mystified by my cryptic proposed usage description, I'm talking about using PrimoCache. You should also be able to use IRST or Hyper-Duo (with the right hardware), but I could cache 3x 3TB HDDs in one task with Primo of either AHCI or RAID, from more than one controller.

It's going to take patience waiting to see the pricing and sizes of what Samsung releases.

Samsung is holding up my project. Even when Egg and other resellers stop showing the 960 Pro as "pre-order," I may have to wait a bit longer than that. But I'll emphasize that for these reasons I can see that the 600P, like brown shoes -- don't make it.

The worst that can happen, based on my experience, shouldn't affect the integrity of data on the spinners or other SATA SSDs, and the point of it especially -- It would seem practical to cache even those to an M.2 large enough to fully manage all of it.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

. . . .
The SLI haters have either not used SLI in years or unrealistically expect 100% scaling in all AAA titles on launch date from the extra videocard. That is not how CF/SLI have ever worked. The point of SLI is to try to find a setup that costs less but on average provides a substantially superior gaming experience, while hwen SLI doesn't work, the slightly faster single card barely provides a superior gaming experience. The SLI setups that fall exactly into this category are 570 SLI vs. 580, 670 SLI vs. 680, 970 SLI vs. 980 and today 1070 SLI vs. 1080. Of course if gaming only at 1080p 60Hz, then SLI is a waste due to major CPU bottlenecks.

BTW, even if your board doesn't support multiple M.2 ports, you can still run multiple M.2 drives via PCIe adapters:

$24

Well, I discovered something simple that had apparently evaded my attention for a long time. With even my best rigs, I try to integrate them with my HT-AVR-HDTV setup. right now, I have two systems so connected to my ONKYO.

For a long time, I kept "troubleshooting" some problem I thought I had with graphics-card power-states. I'm not sure that it had anything to do really with the effective two-monitor setup I impose on these systems. But my attention to power-states and temperature was keen.

I find out that when either the SLI rig or the 1070-blessed Skylake, the clocks drop to the expected minimum when you disable the HDTV connection -- which is after all pretty easy to disable and re-enable. Especially, the cards run warmer at idle in either system, while the CPU clock cycles allocated to HDTV with Media Center are barely noticeable, boosting total usage by 2% to 5%. However, while consuming more power, the SLI rig's 2x 970 run slightly cooler and at relatively lower clocks than the 1070 by itself in the other system.