@Fernando,
I totally agree with you about the daily work.
For the 'as not expected' NVMe devices performance do you think the GPU add in card should be the problem ?
On your system you have no add-in GPU and you use the internal Intel graphic chipsets.
As you know the i7-5930K has no internal GPU and so I use an additional NVIDIA 980 GTX card.
I assume NVMe protocol is very 'sensitive' to the PCIe bus bandwith availability ?
The more devices have to share the PCIe bus chipset bandwith, the less you get NVMe devices performant.
What do you think ?

@Fernando,
Here are ATTO bench (new version v3.05 giving more details) for i750 NVMe and SM951 AHCI.
The WRITE champion is SM951 AHCI (1600 vs 1000), a great difference.
The READ champion is i750 NVMe (2368 vs 2259), but not a big difference.

@Fernando,
I have done a comparative ANVIL and AS_SSD benchmarks between four SSD configurations (400-512 GB) such as:
i750 NVMe 400 GB, iRST RAID 0 512GB with 2xSAMSUNG 840 PRO, SM951 AHCI 512 GB, SM951 NVMe 512 GB.
The ANVIL results ranking gives:
1) i750 NVMe = 10360
2) SM951 NVMe = 9032
3) SM951 AHCI = 8951
4) RAID 0 = 7255
The AS_SSD scores gives the same ranking order.
By the week 45 i'll add ranking of SM950 PRO NVMe 512 GB.

I'm interested, but new to to NVMe SSDs... Using 2 PCI-Express will I be able to make a bootable RAID system? I'm looking forward for 2x Samsung 950 Pro...

@gpvecchi
It seems "the ssdreview" has benched 2 x PCIe RAID 0 W10 bootable configuration.

A compare between i750 NVMe and SM950 PRO NVMe solution in the same system:
i750 NVMe 400 GB (OS drive):



SM950 PRO 512 GB NVMe (non OS drive):




Contrary to i750 the Strategy Poilicies of SM950 PRO can be modified as this:

Just my opinion but for my system and my use, I have never seen 4K QD4 writes so the Pro is the best drive out of the bunch. This is my system.

Hey mate,

That's what I said; 4K QD4 and higher WRITES are not important (to me) as I have never seen QD4 or higher, hence my comment that the PRO is a better drive (to me) even though the Intel 750 "destroys" it with double the speed for that specific metric.

A compare performance of SM950 PRO M.2 plugging solutions in SabertoothX99.

2 solutions does exist to plug-in a SM950 PRO M.2 NVMe PCIe x4 v3.0 device:

1) Use of the 'native M.2 slot' designed on the motherboard.
or
2) Use an 'add-in card adapter' PCIe x4 v3.0 such as Lycom DT-120, or Silverstone ECM20 M.2, or Bplus Technology M2P4A.

Those 2 solutions are NOT equivalent in term of SM950 PRO M.2 NVMe performance on my system.

The 'add-in card adapter' solution is the far most better choice and offers up to 13 % performance increase.

Native solution:



Add-in card solution (DT-120)



After a more than one month mails dialogue with ASUS, the Development Team recognized that native M.2 was designed in compliance with PCIe v2.0 and not PCIe v3.0.
The specifications of the product "missed" this fact..
If you look at the HWINFO above you see the "Current Link Speed" is only 5 Gb/s for the "native" solution and 8 Gb/s for the "add-in card" solution.