Samsung SSDs – not like the rest
UNDERSTANDING HOW A SAMSUNG 960 PRO OR EVO MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE
If there’s one area of PC hardware that has blown through speed barriers exponentially, it’s today’s Solid State Drives, or SSDs for short. With the latest drives delivering much faster performance than drives released just a few years ago, they’ve experienced explosive growth when it comes to throwing data around your system. And there’s one company that has consistently scored highly in product reviews, which is why you’ll find its drives in most prebuilt gaming systems. Samsung has been the leading SSD-maker for several years now, and there are several good reasons why its drives are
outstanding.
WHAT’S AN M.2 DRIVE?
First, a quick refresher if you’re not familiar with M.2 SSDs. They look a little like a stick of memory, and require a special M.2 slot on your motherboard, which is usually nestled by your PCIe slots. You can also use an M.2 to U.2 adaptor, but U.2 ports are about as common as USB 1.0 ports on today’s motherboards. M.2 drives bring several benefits over the original SATA 3 6Gbps connection used on the first 2.5-inch SSDs, namely a huge increase in bandwidth. They have four PCIe 3.0 lanes piped directly to the M.2 slot, hitting a speed of up to 32Gbps, which is almost a sixfold increase over the SATA 3 6Gbps speed. This is why Samsung’s 960 PRO can hit a huge sequential read speed of up to 3,500MB/sec, and sequential write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s, making them incredibly fast in their category. Compare this to SATA 3 6Gbps drives which maxed out at 600MB/ sec whilst doing sequential writing and you can see the huge boost that M.2 delivers to sequential reading and
writing.
WHY NVME IS SO IMPORTANT
However, not all M.2 drives are created equal. There’s another specification that you need to think about when buying an M.2 drive, and it’s called NVMe for short. If you want to impress your friends, you can rattle off what this stands for - Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification. It replaces some of the old technology used on mechanical drives, allowing NVMe SSDs to access flash memory extremely fast. Key to this is the ability to process multiple queues at once. NVMe really helps boost this. This means that NVMe equipped drives can process a staggeringly huge amount of random read and write operations, otherwise referred to as IOPs.
In the case of Samsung’s flagship 960 PRO NVMe drive, this means it can handle up to 440,000 read IOPs in its largest drives, while random writes is up to 360,000. Compare this to our non-NVMe equipped drive, these numbers are at least up to twice as fast for writes, and often up to four times faster for
The problem lies in the fact that most people assume all M.2 drives come with NVMe, but they don’t.