Two Choices.....

Shelster

Shelster

Shelster

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after a recent forced upgrade I now have the option to be able to use an M2 based SSD and have been thinking of expoiting that facility.

Have been looking at a suitable drive and was wondering what is the difference between this one and this one

From what I can see, there is only the difference of the second one comes with a 5 year warranty as opposed the a 2 year on the 1st one. The words about performance are the same.

Am tempted to get the lower priced one if there is no difference. Can live with ony a 2 year warranty
 
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950 is a retail unit comes with 5 year warranty and is black and comes with the new vnand

the 951 is oem so only 3 year and slightly older tech

Theres a lot of reports that the 950 however can get warm and throttle with lots of recommendations to add heatsinks and/or a fan to keep the performance
 
Went for the cheaper one of the two.....realise the 950 is newer but for me it will be sufficient.

Now just need to work out a procedure for doing the swap. Current c drive is 256 so no issues with size. Am thinking the following

1 create clone image of current drive
2 switch off and add me drive
3 switch back on and enable drive in bios and then check it is seen in windows
4 restore image from step 1 to new m2 drive
5 switch off and disconnect original boot drive
6 switch back on, changing boot sequence in bios
7 enjoy slight speed increase

Any recommendations on suitable cloning software? And are my steps right too?
 
SM951 as already stated is not really a consumer product and as such.

- Warranty is only 2 years (and not 3 as stated above). Also resides with the re-seller and NOT Samsung. As these drives were never really intended to be sold to retail customers.

- No support from Samsung in Magician. Or any other monitoring software come to that. So nothing can read the SMART data, secure Erase it, or update the firmware. Where the Samsung 950 pro is fully supported in Magician.

- Thermal throttling (as long as your case is well cooled) is really a non issue on these drives for the average user. Only really experienced in the sort of sustained heavy workloads that you can find in some synthetic benchmarks. All the reputable sites state this (Anandtech, Toms Hardware etc.). Quote from Anandtech:

"To sum things up, there is no need to worry about thermal throttling under typical client workloads. There won't be any notable performance loss unless you subject the drive under an intensive sustained workload which may be relevant to some professional users (e.g. high-end video editing), but not for the typical enthusiast and power user...."

- To get full performance from them ... Make sure you are running a motherboard that fully supports PCIe 3.0 and the latest M2 socket.

Nothing wrong with these drives (I do in fact have one myself). But if I was buying now, I would go for the Samsung 950 pro. And unless money is a consideration, this would be my recommendation to anyone at the moment.

Only really posted the above in case anyone else is reading this and is interested. As OP has already purchased an SM951. And as usual it's really up to the individual as to what they do etc.

I'm sure you will have no problems with your SM951. Great little drives but still hard to recommend against a decent SATA based SSD if considering value-for-money against performance etc.

PS. Native Windows 10 NVMe driver seems to work fine with these drives (that's what I run with). You can install Samsung's NVMe driver that is for the 950 pro (available on their WEB site) and that appears to work as well. Though I saw no real difference when I tried it, so reverted back to the Windows driver. If you do run with the Samsung 950 NVMe driver, the latest version of HWiNFO64 will give you some basic drive information...
I have a sneaky feeling that Samsung have actually disabled SMART functionality in the firmware in these drives. As I have read of a couple of instances (when they were running earlier firmware) of a couple of folks bricking their drives when trying to Secure Erase it. Also worth noting that he latest version of Parted Magic also can't Secure Erase these drives. I had a long (and at times acrimonious) discussion with a couple of the PM boyz on their forum about this.
 
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Your steps re-cloning look basically OK.

Most folks will recommend macrium reflect (think there is even a guide on the forum somewhere on how to use it) but I use Acronis True Image myself. Paid version ... as I like to set up a proper back-up strategy for my PC's. And rather than cloning, I take a full disk backup, replace the drive and then recover the back-up to the new drive. This is in fact the recommended way by Acronis. Though cloning usually doesn't give any issues.

Also if wanting to boot from these drives:

Whatever NVMe drive you buy, you'll still likely need to meet all of the following requirements, if you plan to also use it as a boot device:

- A newer system, such as the Xeon D-1540 or Skylake chipsets (2015 or later)
- Modern OSs have the NVMe driver built-in, like Windows 8.1/10 or Windows Server 2016.
- A UEFI BIOS that supports boot from NVMe (not something you can assume)
- An M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 slot (as in 4 lanes, key to obtaining the maximum speeds)
- BIOS in UEFI boot mode (nice bonus is that it allows your bootable device to be larger than 2TB, since Windows will use GPT rather than legacy MBR)
- Some mobos also require CSM (Compatibility Support Mode) be turned on.

Good luck.

PS. You don't state what platform you are building on, or what version of Windows you intend to run. So hard to tell if you are going to hit any issues.
 
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