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Samsung 850 Pro vs SM863?

SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
You should have seen the attacks I received when I said boot times and multitasking regular apps won't improve significantly just because you go from an SSD on SATA 2, to SATA 3, to PCIE. They just couldn't understand that those operations aren't consuming big bandwidth. The power of self delusion, group reinforcement and consumerism was saddening to see. Big numbers sell, people who buy stuff don't want to do it alone.
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Indeed. I run a lot of VM's to prototype backup solutions for ESXi, usually with Tivoli Storage Manager. Even with multiple VM's running (10+) on standard SATA 2 on a laptop, it was always CPU or the amount of RAM that were the limiting factor. I notice the I/O limitations of SSD's, but that's when I'm running something particularly I/O intensive like de-duplication, but very rarely do I run at 500MB/s+, only bench mark programs do this.

I dare say that I push my machines higher than most and I've yet to see a quantum leap in performance that was the difference from HDD to SSD when moving from SATA 2 to SATA 3. The PCI-e SSD in my nMP, if I benchmark it gets around 900MB/s, but in the real world it doesn't feel any quicker than the Samsung 840 Pro hanging off a SATA 3 port on my PC. My perception is that Word, Excel and other 'normal' apps load at the same speed on my Mac as they do on my PC. Both machines feel fluid and nice to use, there's no stutters or pauses in operation - both machines have loads of RAM too.

I've taken an 840 Pro from an internal SATA 3 port and put it into a Thunderbolt enclosure and seen a drop in streaming I/O performance. The enclosure I have is at fault here (it was cheap), not thunderbolt as a Promise Pegasus 2 R4 on a different Thunderbolt port on the same machine absolutely kicks it's ass for streaming I/O - 500+MB/s for the Pegasus, 300MB/s for the SSD. Guess which one is noticeably faster when loading VM's though? The SSD.

Many people here read far too much into benchmarks and forget that SSD's are now mature enough for you to buy pretty much any of the major brands and they will be more than good enough for their requirements. The OP for this thread had different requirements, and actually understood those requirements. For him I would recommend looking at the benchmarks on Anandtech as they know how to benchmark properly, and include the random read results, or just getting decent brand SSD like Samsung or Intel and testing it for a day or two before deciding whether to keep it or not.
 
Please let us know of your findings once you test the 951 in your DAW Simon; you are focusing on a significant and often overlooked aspect of SSD performance.

If you find the PCIe SSD improves things, you should, someday, be able to find the referenced PCIe card. A friend at MOTUNation recently purchased and is running the Amfeltec card with four 951s striped RAID and getting fantastic (6k MB/Sec) sequential speeds. Super quick project loading times resulted. As you and others note, whether this speed will actually mean anything when running sessions is another thing.

Personally, I have been perfectly happy running multiple SATA SSDs (some on SATA2 and some on SATA3) in my audio production work. Disc i/o is never an issue for me.
 
DPUser said:
A friend at MOTUNation recently purchased and is running the Amfeltec card with four 951s striped RAID and getting fantastic (6k MB/Sec) sequential speeds. Super quick project loading times resulted.
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I'm sure you know all this already but we repeat it for others.

Those same project loading times would likely occur at a much lower speed. I was the first person to purchase and RAID the SM951 drives, three of them. Boot time remained unchanged from SSD on SATA 2. Loading a 2GB TIFF in Photoshop was only 1 second faster than SATA 3.

You have to remember, even if you have the fastest possible drives there is also a limit to how fast software can open, process, and display files. The CPU is also a limiting factor and just because you add more and more gigahertz and cores also doesn't guarantee the same software will give a linear scaled performance increase.

And then Premiere and After Effeces projects don't require massive bandwidth just to load. They utilise the extra bandwidth when the app is actually in use, scrubbing, creating cached files, utilising the scratch. Even then there is a limit to how fast the apps can display rendered content in the viewport . It all has to go through the CPU first and that can only handle so much. Complicating matter more is that Premiere and After Effects don't utilise every core available and on many operations they ignore a second CPU.
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
Those same project loading times would likely occur at a much lower speed. I was the first person to purchase and RAID the SM951 drives, three of them. Boot time remained unchanged from SSD on SATA 2. Loading a 2GB TIFF in Photoshop was only 1 second faster than SATA 3.
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Actually, he is experiencing much faster load times than when he had his virtual instrument sample libraries on SATA SSDs. DAW templates and projects with VIs can require loading a huge number of samples into RAM.
 
lexR said:
Lou,

I have just picked up a Lycom DT-120 and a Samsung SM951 512GB module and only getting half the speeds your getting on your set up? I'm in PCIe slot 2 above my GTX 980 ti sc... am i missing something?

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That SSD doesn't negotiate the correct link in slot 2 because Mac EFI just isn't a universal standard in the same way UEFI or BIOS is.

Glad to see you use AJA. It's so much more informative for video production than Blackmagic.
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
That SSD doesn't negotiate the correct link in slot 2 because Mac EFI just isn't a universal standard in the same way UEFI or BIOS is.

Glad to see you use AJA. It's so much more informative for video production than Blackmagic.
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Should it be in slot 3 then? not sure i fully understand 'That SSD doesn't negotiate the correct link in slot 2' means in relation to half the performance of others using same setup?? apologies for my lack of understanding....
 
lexR said:
Should it be in slot 3 then? not sure i fully understand 'That SSD doesn't negotiate the correct link in slot 2' means in relation to half the performance of others using same setup?? apologies for my lack of understanding....
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Because it fails to make the right negotiation in slot 1 or 2 it defaults to the slowest mode possible. So yes, slot 3 or 4.
 
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