M.2 drives like the Samsung 950 Pro can give incredible performance, but they can sometimes run hot enough that the drive needs to throttle the performance to stay under safe temperatures. To help you decide if it is something you need to worry about, we decided to benchmark a Samsung 950 Pro in a variety of M.2 slot locations with a range of system configurations to show how much a Samsung 950 Pro might throttle in your system.
Samsung SATA SSD’s Amazing Reliability
At Puget Systems, we spend a a lot of effort tracking the failure rates of all our products to make sure that each is living up to our quality standards. Today, we want to publish a short article to specifically call out one line of products for being extremely reliable: Samsung SATA SSDs.
Product Review: Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 Drive
The Samsung 950 Pro is the successor to the Samsung SM951 and their first retail M.2 drive. While this drive does run cooler than previous M.2 drives from Samsung, it still has some throttling issues due to high temperatures. Even with that, this drive has incredible sequential read and write performance at an attractive price point.
Product Review: Samsung SM951 M.2 Drive
The Samsung SM951 is the successor to what was at one time the fastest consumer M.2 drive – the Samsung XP941. This drive has incredible sequential read and write performance, but suffers from extremely high temperatures under load.
Understanding the WD Rainbow
WD has a very diverse hard drive product line that can be difficult to decipher at times. In this article we go over the various 3.5inch hard drive lines from WD to help you decide which is right for your system.
Western Digital Green vs. Red Hard Drives
WD Green drives have a long been a staple in our quiet systems. However, the NAS and RAID oriented Red drives have a few features that make them much more attractive while being just as quiet. In this article, we will go over the differences between Green and Red drives to show why we consider Red drives to be the better choice than Green drives in most quiet systems.
Western Digital Black vs. RE Hard Drives
Here at Puget Systems, almost half of the traditional hard drives we sell are Western Digital Black drives. However, the enterprise-class RE drives have many features that make them much more attractive, but are also more expensive. In this article, we will go over the differences between Black and RE drives to show why we consider RE drives to be the better choice than Black drives in most systems.
Overview of M.2 SSDs
M.2 is a new form of connectivity that allows a SSD to connect directly to the PCI-E bus allowing for theoretical speeds as high as 2GB/s. However, M.2 drives are complicated in that they allow for a variety of physical dimensions, connectors, and even multiple logical interfaces. To help our customers understand the nuances of M.2 drives, we decided to publish this overview of M.2 SSDs.
Samsung XP941 & Plextor PX-G256 M6e M.2 Qualification
M.2 is a new form of connectivity for SSD drives that allows them to connect directly to the PCI-E bus rather than going through a SATA controller. By bypassing the SATA controller a M.2 drive can have a theoretical maximum throughput as high as 2GB/s which is over three times faster than the 600MB/s SATA is limited to! Unfortunately, temperature and motherboard compatibility is a major issue with these M.2 drives.
Introduction to Self-Encrypting Drives (SED)
A SED (or Self-Encrypting Drive) is a type of hard drive that automatically and continuously encrypts the data on the drive without any user interaction. In fact, many drives currently on the market are SEDs, although the majority of users do not know the benefits of a SED, let alone how to take advantage of those benefits.