WINNER: Samsung 960 Pro
URL: 2016
was the year when several key new PC technologies went mainstream, not least the M.2 form factor for SSDs. These drives are even smaller than a stick of RAM, but deliver up to triple the speed of ye olde SATA 6 3Gbps drives. This is because they’re jacked straight into four lanes of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth.
Samsung’s 960 Pro was one such drive to utilise this connection, and it also featured something else that helped boost random read/write performance through the roof – NVMe, which stands for Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification. This is a replacement for the old AHCI method that was used to write to the platter in mechanical drives, and is designed specifically to take advantage of the quirks of solid state memory. In the past, drives could only process a single queue of instructions, but NVMe boosts this to an incredible 65,536, which allows for a huge increase in simultaneous I/ O requests.
Benchmarks showed that of all the M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drives on the market, Samsung’s 960 Pro was arguably the fastest. With sequential read speeds in excess of 3000MB/sec and sequential write speeds of over 2000MB/sec, it was a 40% leap over the previous year’s best, the Samsung 950 Pro. IOPs performance also went through the roof, hitting 440,000 read and 360,000 writes.
Meanwhile it also boosted the capacity of the drives, offering variants up to 2TB in size. Sure, you can build a full gaming PC for the same price as one of these
you can build a full gaming PC for the same price as one of these drives
drives, which currently retail at around $1650, but fitting so much memory into such a small space is simply amazing, and a result of Samsung’s 3D V-NAND memory process.
These speeds mean your games will load faster than ever, but more noticeable is the huge boost they deliver when multitasking with different applications. Flicking between open apps and browser tabs is basically instantaneous. There is one odd thing about the new drives though; Samsung has halved the prior ten-year warranty to five years. Still, five years is an eternity in the tech world.
So once again, for the third year in a row, Samsung has taken out our top SSD of the year. I guess that’s what happens when you control the entire manufacturing process from the top to bottom rather than sourcing bits and pieces from a myriad of companies.