SAMSUNG 960 PRO M.2 2TB
The best SSD on the market just got better.
W hen solid-state drives first arrived, there was much rejoicing. The PC had crossed the final frontier. Mechanical devices could be banished, and with them performance bottlenecks.
But the first consumer SSDs had some serious performance flaws. Once those were hammered out, SSDs began to bump up against the limitations of the SATA interface and AHCI control protocol. Then PCI Express tech removed that bottleneck, and the NVMe protocol enabled even more responsiveness.
SSDs are still getting faster and that’s the context into which Samsung’s new solid-state killer arrives. Expectations are high, given the outstanding history of Samsung’s Pro line of SSDs.
The 960 Pro is effectively Samsung’s second-gen of consumer-targeted PCI Express SSDs in M.2 format, following the kickass 950 Pro, although Samsung did offer a few OEM M.2 drives before the 950 Pro. The 960 Pro is pretty much all-new. It uses Samsung’s latest Polaris controller chip, and it’s also transitioned from Samsung’s 32-layer 3D NAND memory chips to 48-layer chips, with double the data density.
The upshot is some stellar claimed performance numbers. The old 950 Pro was far from shabby, with its 2.2GB/s read rating, and max IOPs performance of 300k. But the new 960 Pro blows it out of the water. The 2TB model tops out at an epic 3.5GB/s for reads and 2.1GB/s for writes.
The QD32 random access numbers are almost as impressive, at 440k read IOPs and 360k write IOPs. The latter figure is well over three times the official 110k write IOPs of the 950 Pro. As if that wasn’t enough, the endurance rating is up, too, and rocks in at a beefy 1,200TB. But not all the numbers are as spectacular. Samsung has only managed an incremental improvement in QD1 random access performance. But as a whole, it’s a huge leap over what was already a lightning-fast drive.
In some regards, that’s how it plays out in our benchmarks, too. In ATTO Disk Benchmark’s raw test of throughput, the 960 Pro demolishes data at roughly the claimed multi-gigabyte rates. It’s much quicker than the 950 Pro in CrystalMark’s sequential tests, too. Elsewhere, though, the 960 Pro is very fast, but not as big a step forward as we’d hoped. It only improves on the 950 Pro’s 51MB/s CrystalMark 4K reads by 7MB/s, for example. And it’s actually a little slower than the 950 in CrystalMark’s 4K write tests. The 960 Pro is likewise barely any quicker in our real-world file copy test than either the 950 Pro or Intel’s 750 Series 1.2TB drive. We also had the same issues with 4K benchmarking in AS SSD that we saw with the 950 Pro. You could write that off as a quirk with that particular benchmark, but it’s difficult to be certain that there aren’t real-world workloads that would trigger the same issues.
It’s one of those weird situations where we have a product that’s probably faster than anything we’ve seen previously. At 2TB, it’s also a reminder that, soon, you won’t need a magnetic drive. And yet, somehow, the 960 Pro leaves us less than totally convinced. It’s probably the best drive you can buy at the moment. But it’s still not perfect.
It’s also worth noting that Intel’s 3D Xpoint tech is coming, and might just revolutionise storage tech.