Samsung 960 Pro Speed Freaks

Report · Jan 06, 2017

How about this from two Samsung 960 Pro M.2 in RAID 0:

But I will have to say that exporting from Premiere with the PPBM disk intensive Disk I/O timeline cannot take advantage of this sequential write speed. Our Premiere Pro benchmark stops improving at ~2000 MB/second so this configuration would not be practical usage.

I just could not resist showing these astronomical transfer rates

Report · Jan 07, 2017

Interesting, thanks for posting.

Cheers

Michael

Report · Jan 09, 2017

Hi Bill,

I've been following your posts, very informative, thanks!

I'll be doing a new build in Feb or March, and was planning on doing an Samsung 512gb 850 (pro or evo) boot, programs and then a 512gb 960 pro m2 drive for media. Was just wondering though, since I have to buy both new drives... can / should I go with two 960's using one for boot and the other for media, etc? The cost would only be the difference from an 850 to a similar 960.

(I'm planning on using an Asus x99 Deluxe 2 with a 6850 processor and Asus 1060 video)

Any tips would be much appreciated...

mp

Report · Jan 09, 2017

Well you forced me to look at the 950 Pro 512 GB versus the 960 Pro 512 GB and there is only $2.00 difference between these two on Newegg today. Of course for the boot drive you really do not need 512 GB, 256 GB is more than enough. Here there is a $50 difference for the M.2 plus for the second M.2 device you need a PCIe adapter card.

Since I have two 960 Pro's I guess it makes sense for me to go to my desktop and run my PPBM with two of those. I will not be able to do it tonight but will try for tomorrow and see if there is any difference over my running off a SATA III boot device. My gut feeling right now is there no significant difference. I will have to break that RAID configuration that I now have and reload a boot configuration on one drive.

Report · Jan 10, 2017

Yes, thanks Bill, that would be awesome.

I thought there was an Asus expansion card that comes with the x99 Deluxe 2. Is that option for another m2 drive or something else? I thought I saw a picture of your computer with the two m2 drive and the one is in an Asus card.

Yes, using a 256mb m2 for os and programs. I would think the computer would boot much faster and load programs much faster and then why not - if the cost is not that much different than having to purchase a 256mb SSD like the 850 pro and using that for os/progams?

Report · Jan 10, 2017

MyerPj wrote:
I thought there was an Asus expansion card that comes with the x99 Deluxe 2. Is that option for another m2 drive or something else? I thought I saw a picture of your computer with the two m2 drive and the one is in an Asus card.

That is true but with my x99-E WS, I had to buy my adapters (I have several other adapters that work well).

Data coming on the comparison.

Report · Jan 12, 2017

BTW Bill, where are you getting the 960's? I've been watching for some time at B&H Photo, and the website consistently says 2-4 weeks?

Report · Jan 12, 2017

Interesting my first 960 Pro 512GB came directly from Samsung but I had several orders placed which I canceled when I got the first notification of shipment. Later I ordered the 960 Pro 1 TB from Newegg and was lucky to get one of their early shipments.

As you can see using a 512 GB and a 1 TB unit in RAID 0 is not a practical use but while I wasted 512 GB it did allow me to gather some exotic data.just imagine reading sequential data at >5 TB/second

Report · Jan 13, 2017

How do you think is it best to set up the drives for Premiere in terms of storage with this specific RAID?

Just a raid and all media cache, previews, media, projects, backups and exports all together or would it be better to split it and arrange it in a different way?

Why do you think it is not getting benefits from over 2TB/s? Could it be a bottleneck anywhere or could it be related with the benchmark itself?

Apart from that, can I ask you how much that system scored in ppbm?

Report · Jan 15, 2017

I will get back here later today with answers to your questions

Report · Jan 16, 2017

danielh19294473 wrote:
1. How do you think is it best to set up the drives for Premiere in terms of storage with this specific RAID?
2. Just a raid and all media cache, previews, media, projects, backups and exports all together or would it be better to split it and arrange it in a different way?
3. Why do you think it is not getting benefits from over 2TB/s? Could it be a bottleneck anywhere or could it be related with the benchmark itself?
4. Apart from that, can I ask you how much that system scored in ppbm?

I will not use this RAID as it shows me no advantage over a single device. My editing configuration (as opposed to my experimenting configurations) probably will be a single SATA III 6Gbit/s SSD and projects on the 1 TB m.2 Samsung 1TB SSD.
No to RAID. Unless somehow I get into more complex media (I do have a Sony FDR-AX100 that produces 4K 100 Mbits/second XAVC-S video that works perfectly) I will not consider anything else. I have the default location for the "Media Cache" and "Media Cache Files" on the boot SSD and all else on the M.2 drive.
It is called the "Law of Diminishing Returns" The bottleneck is now fast the CPU can hand the data to the storage device and may also somewhat Premiere limited. We designed the disk intensive benchmark to test the hardware from within Premiere by using the must native to Premiere the AVI format.
Here is a work in progress that will show you more PPBM result than you want

[Link Fixed by Mod]

Report · Jan 16, 2017

Hi Bill. The link seem to be broken!

Report · Jan 16, 2017

I cannot edit that post I even logged out and signed in again

Here is the corrected link.

Boot drive selection

Report · Jan 16, 2017

Thank you for the new link Bill. It makes me sort off sorry now that I may have wasted money on the perceived upgrade to my C drive?

Mike

Report · Jan 16, 2017

Bill,

Thanks for the " boot drive selection" link which shows the results of your testing. How things have changed in just a few years !!

Your tests reveal that using a new single Samsung 960 Pro NVMe PCI SSD for EVERYTHING causes NO performance penalty...at least that you know of...and it is no longer necessary to have separate drives to achieve best performance with PPro !! This is really amazing.....no separate " boot drive", no need for a " scratch disk",or, a separate drive to export to, etc. Wow !

No need for the expensive Areca add in cards and the hassle of maintaining expensive multi-hard drive RAID arrays !!! All this improvement will allow more people to participate in a high quality video editing experience without the former prohibitive cost or frustration having to work on slower, less expensive equipment. The advances are so dramatic that even laptops are nearing the ability to compete with desktop systems !!! Currently, laptops can now have equal storage speed, system memory capacity, ( almost), and equal NVidia GPU power. Only the CPUs are restricted in laptops to 4 core i7s, but, the frequencies are going higher. Soon, even that may be overcome as somehow high clocked CPUs with more cores for laptops will be developed.

Now, users will be able to focus more on creativity, instead of on confounding hardware issues which were a plague of the past as inadequate average machines chugged along slowly with their components serving as " space heaters" while editors drank endless cups of coffee waiting for their projects to slowly complete !! A new "Renaissance" is just beginning !!

Report · Jan 16, 2017

I've been following this development during the last 3 years and I'm equally amazed.

This improvement has been so of a sudden that I haven't even had time to get used to the idea.

WOW, is the only I can think of by now. Laptops reaching maybe 2 or 3 years old similar desktop performance is just something mindblowing.

Report · Jan 16, 2017

Hi Bill and Mike,

Interesting thread here. Motivated by this I ordered two 960s, a 500gb EVO and 512gb Pro. Since both are to 'ship sometime soonish' I figured I'd keep the first one or even get both.

Mike I am thinking of a rig similar to your basic one, (probably with no spinning drives) 6850 and Asus x99 Deluxe II with the Asus card. If I end up with both drives, I'll probably use the EVO for booting. I rarely go 3 years without refreshing my boot drive as Windows starts getting slugish, so I would replace that one at that time.

Bill, have you ever booted with one of the 960s? then use one for your media files, etc? I planning to purchase two new SSDs for the new rig, and the price is not that much greater to make them both 960's instead of a boot SATA III. Then I can use one of my current 256k SATA III drives for quick backups, etc and an external eSATA spinning drive to get the files out of the main box.

g

Report · Jan 16, 2017

Hi G. The ASUS X99 Deluxe II is a very nice looking board and I like alot. I hid have a problem with a lengthy start up time that could last for a minute or more! I did a little digging and found that if you turn off the QUICK BOOT in Windows that this fixes the problem. I have the quick boot enabled and the time set to 0 in the BIOS SETUP. I think you will be happy with it.

Best of look with your new PC.

Regards.

Mike.

PS. Please come back and let up all know how you get on.

Report · Jan 16, 2017

I was thinking the boot up time would be one of the advantages of using the m2 drive for that, as well as loading programs, etc. I've continued with Win7 up to now, but was thinking of moving to Win10 for the next rig. I don't know of the Quick Boot from Win7, but just found this from a google search:

http://lifehacker.com/enable-this-setting-to-make-windows-10-boot-up-faster-1743697169

So, you're saying turn this off and turn on the quick boot in the BIOS, sounds good.

Looking at the chart Bill just posted, I guess I could go from a single 1TB 960. Though, since I've had the smaller C: SSD I'm kind of used to having the data drive around now. And I like that I can just copy everything over to a new drive, or just swap out the c: drive and continue with the data drive as it is.

Report · Jan 16, 2017

Hi myerPj. I held out for about four to five months before i finally moved over to Windows 10. I just liked Windows 7 Pro so much, but I found that W 10 is much like W7 only faster. This was on my old 5/6 year old i7 PC. I made a copy of my C drive before I went for the free upgrade which I still have on a 450Gb SSD. I never went back to it?

The only thing that I can say about the fast boot in W 10 is see how you get on with it as is and then try switching it off and see for yourself if there is any improvement in your PC's startup performance.

Cheers.

Mike

Report · Jan 16, 2017

Thanks Mike, Yes, will almost certainly go to w10 now, thanks for the confidence boost. I read up a bit on that, and it seems to do with "hibernate" I've got that off already in w7 (and have finally forced it off on my 88yo mother's computer cause she kept doing that). So, I can see your point, you've got the hardware to boot really fast, you don't need the artificial fast booting of Windows.

Good tip, cheers!

Report · Jan 16, 2017

Bill, have you ever booted with one of the 960s? then use one for your media files, etc? I planning to purchase two new SSDs for the new rig, and the price is not that much greater to make them both 960's instead of a boot SATA III. Then I can use one of my current 256k SATA III drives for quick backups, etc and an external eSATA spinning drive to get the files out of the main box.
g

That is what to link is for. it shows booting to a 960 Pro and also running everything off a single 960 Pro

Report · Jan 16, 2017

1. If you see no performance improvement over using a single drive, as you state in the link, why do you use an extra Sata III SSD for booting? I see you say something about missing frames in playback, does this happens a lot and its noticeable?

2. About what you say when talking about complex media: How complex is the disk intensive bench? Could it be similar to, for example some of the most demanding codecs that Harm uploaded in a table in PPBM7.com?

3. Got it!

4. This may seem a stupid question, but... In the second point of your conclusions you say that "going with a single SSD doesn't have any performance penalty". I just want to clarify, you're talking about having a single PCIe Gen3 x4 (Samsung 950 or 960) not a Sata III (Samsung 840), don't you? I'm telling this because I'm looking apart from upgrading my desktop PC to buy a laptop because I'll be travelling a lot and I was specifically looking for laptops with PCIe storage.

Thank you a lotBill Gehrke with your help! And congrats with the new PPBM8! It's nice to see the project will continue to be alive in some way.

Bests!!!

Report · Jan 17, 2017

I like a separate drive for OS/Applications for simplification of the keeping things organized, I have been able to clone my OS/Applications for testing and backup purposes without having it cluttered with project files. When I ran the single drive tests it seemed confusing to my old fashioned ways. Missing frames was a potential way to test for timeline "play-ability" which I would love to test but turns out to be non-repeatable.
If you simply want to do a disk intensive test in Premiere you want it to be minimally CPU involved, complex media is highly CPU involved. Harm did design the highly complex 8-layer with many different media types including some 4K media H.264 timeline but since that is highly CPU and GPU intensive, no way is it good to measure Premiere's disk performance
?
Yes to work properly you definitely need the PCI Gen 3 x4 M.2 SSD

Report · Jan 14, 2017

The ASUS Deluxe X99II comes with a riser card as standard. I have this board and the i7-6850K clocked at 4.2. I am waiting on the Samsung 960 Pro to arrive so I can change out the intel 600P 1Tb I currently have as my C drive. I also have a Samsung 950 Pro 256Gb M.2 as my scratch drive on the supplied riser card.

Regards.

mike.