WooHoo, Just scored a few 512GB Samsung SM951 SSD's

[Diablo360]

I had been looking for these drives forever with no luck and then just happened to find a seller on eBay that had them for a pretty reasonable price (for brand new drives at least). Knowing how hard these are to come I thought I'd give you guys a heads up, here's a link to the listing: http://www.ebay.com/itm/252806393821

Also does anyone know if the 000H1 model is different than the 00000 model? I'm clocking somewhere around 1300-1400mb per second read and write speeds. Is this around average?

 

[joebclash]

what pcie card are you going to use that drive with?

 

[h9826790]

H1 means it's made for HP computer as OEM parts. My understanding is that's still basically the same SM951, but just no warranty. Since you won't get any warranty anyway, so virtually no difference then the 00 model.

Did you check if the SSD is really new? If that's true, it's pretty good. Most of the good price SM951 I can find out there are used between 4-50hours. It looks like just for QC / testing purpose, but not really new.

 

[Diablo360]

what pcie card are you going to use that drive with?

With the four blades I'm using the Amfeltec Squid card shown here:
http://amfeltec.com/products/pci-express-carrier-board-for-m-2-ssd-modules/

When I was using a single blade I was using this $20 Lycom card that worked without a hitch:
https://www.amazon.com/Lycom-DT-120-PCIe-Adapter-Support/dp/B00MYCQP38
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H1 means it's made for HP computer as OEM parts. My understanding is that's still basically the same SM951, but just no warranty. Since you won't get any warranty anyway, so virtually no difference then the 00 model.

Did you check if the SSD is really new? If that's true, it's pretty good. Most of the good price SM951 I can find out there are used between 4-50hours. It looks like just for QC / testing purpose, but not really new.

The drives were definitely new. I double checked with the seller and he said that he received them new in bulk hard drive trays and that they were sourced from a company that sells hard drives.

 

[kalex]

I picked up 256gb version of this for $99. Waiting for 512gb to be on sale

 

[Filin]

The drives were definitely new. I double checked with the seller and he said that he received them new in bulk hard drive trays and that they were sourced from a company that sells hard drives.

Actually you can read Power On Hours parameter of the SSD drive with some utility, that can read S.M.A.R.T data (ex SSD Health or similar)
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Waiting for 512gb to be on sale

Absolutely agree with. $340 for 512Gb is too much. For that money you can buy 1Tb SATA drive, which not so fast, but twice bigger

 

[Diablo360]

Actually you can read Power On Hours parameter of the SSD drive with some utility, that can read S.M.A.R.T data (ex SSD Health or similar)
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Absolutely agree with. $340 for 512Gb is too much. For that money you can buy 1Tb SATA drive, which not so fast, but twice bigger

True True, but for those of us who have to have the fastest drive speed maybe it's worth it to have at least a single blade for the boot drive and programs, and then another pcie card running a cheaper sata ssd setup. This would be a reasonable setup that costs way less than the insane 4 blade Amfeltec card setup.

 

[h9826790]

True True, but for those of us who have to have the fastest drive speed maybe it's worth it to have at least a single blade for the boot drive and programs, and then another pcie card running a cheaper sata ssd setup. This would be a reasonable setup that costs way less than the insane 4 blade Amfeltec card setup.

It's been proved that using the PCIe SSD for boot / loading apps is one of the worst way to utilise the SSD. For boot time, it's practically zero gain from SATA SSD to PCIe SSD. For loading apps, may be half second faster. If you only need to load the apps once per day for your normal workflow, and you have few apps to open per day. Then your gain may be few second for the whole day, virtually zero gain.

To fully utilise the SSD, you should boot from the cheap SATA SSD, doesn't really matter have the SATA III card or not. Store the apps on this SSD also fine. But put the large size library, source files, etc on the PCIe SSD. And use this fastest SSD to work.

I can confirm that (with my own test) boot time and apps loading time has basically zero improvement from SATA II to SATA III. The reading speed rarely can reach 200MB/s. That means won't bottleneck by the connection type.

There is not much a PCIe SSD can benefit the system when it act as boot drive. The biggest advantage may be when you run out of RAM, the swap file can save / load much faster. However, that should not happen on a system that have enough RAM. And spend money on RAM usual is better than spend the same amount money on a faster PCIe SSD as boot drive (assume the boot drive is already a SSD)