Samsung 960 Pro 512GB
The fastest SSD we’ve ever tested; it’s too expensive for a general recommendation, but otherwise hard to fault
If you’re looking for a drive that truly unlocks the potential of NVMe, this is it. The Samsung 960 Pro is the fastest consumer SSD we’ve ever tested, easily seeing off all-comers in our sequential read and write benchmarks. We’re talking about four times the read speed of your typical SATA drive, and more than three times the write speed.
Admittedly, the 960 Pro didn’t do quite so well in the multi-threaded tests; here it kept pace with the competition, but didn’t stand out. Overall though it has an undoubted edge in real-world workloads, as attested by a string of first-place results in the PCMark 8 storage benchmarks.
That stunning performance is partnered with hardware encryption and a decent five-year warranty. A 400TBW endurance rating for this 512GB drive is reassuring too – rising to an absurd 1.2PBW for the top-of-the-range 2TB model.
With all this going for it, we were tempted to name the 960 Pro as one of this month’s winners. What stayed our hand is the price. £292 is a lot to pay for a half-terabyte drive, and there’s no smaller model available. For most of us, the 960 Evo is a better buy: it’s not far behind in terms of performance, it comes in a more versatile range of capacities, and it costs significantly less. If money is no object, however, there’s nothing to match the Samsung 960 Pro.