Samsung announces wicked fast 960 Pro, Evo solid state drives

Shawn Knight

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Samsung on Wednesday announced a pair of insanely fast M.2 solid state drives in the 960 Pro and 960 Evo during its SSD Global Summit 2016 in Seoul, South Korea.

Offered in capacities of 512GB, 1TB and 2TB, the 960 Pro delivers peak sequential read and write transfer speeds of 3,500 MB/s and 2,100 MB/s, respectively, with random read and write IOPS of up to 440,000 and 360,000. According to Samsung, that makes it the fastest M.2 NVMe SSD in the world.

Samsung tells us that the 2TB drive will come with a five-year warranty and up to 1.2 petabytes written, whichever occurs first.

The 960 Evo is no slouch, either. With Samsung’s new Intelligent TurboWrite technology, the drive is good for sequential read and write speeds of up to 3,200 MB/s and 1,900 MB/s respectively. Random read speeds top out at up to 380,000 IOPS while random writes can hit 360,000 IOPS, we’re told.

It’ll be offered in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities with the largest affording a three-year warranty and up 400 terabytes written, whichever occurs first.

Image credit: Anandtech & PC Per

Both lines feature Samsung’s Dynamic Thermal Guard technology, a type of throttling that kicks in when the drives reach a certain temperature threshold. If you’re looking to get the most out of either drive, you’ll no doubt want to install it in a well-ventilated system with plenty of airflow.

The new 960 Pro and 960 Evo go on sale next month with pricing starting at $129.99 and $329.99, respectively.

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Yes! Perfect timing! I've just run out of space on my current Samsung NVMe Drive. Imma treat myself to a 512GB Pro me thinks.
 
Welp. Looks like I am going to have to cross out one of my Christmas wish list items and replace it with a 960 Pro.
 
I've been needing an upgrade from my 240GB ssd. I'm pretty sure I don't need nvme speed and the prices are still super high. I may just go for a 1TB m.2 sata ssd instead. I guess it depends on how long I can wait. Prices on these should keep dropping.
 
I just got into the SSD thing on my laptop in March, my home computer last weekend.
I'll hold off. BOTH seem like rockets now. So much nicer to bring up photoshop and
not have to wait forever for it to load.
 
This insane price point. Why wouldn't you want one at this price? Now for games to make use of this super speedy technology!
 
I was seriously considering the 850 Pro for a custom build at the end of the year, but no doubt in my mind this is gonna be the "Go To" SSD for me and I can't wait for these to be released. Much love to Samsung for bring us this amazing technology!
 
Any practical experience here with 950 Pro (M.2) vs. 850 Pro SSD? I'm not seeing the value other than faster boot times, Video/Audio encoding and marginally for gaming. Am I missing something?
 
Any practical experience here with 950 Pro (M.2) vs. 850 Pro SSD? I'm not seeing the value other than faster boot times, Video/Audio encoding and marginally for gaming. Am I missing something?
Not really. As soon as you go to storage on another drive, the speed then becomes that of the storage drive, not the SSD.

Since it's more or less impractical, (at least with respect to today's prices of the hardware), to place an entire HTPC's worth of files, a large music collection, or any extensive files of any type on an SSD, that's a strikeout as well.

As an example, you could import batches of photos to the C:/ drive, (SSD), then process them very rapidly. Unfortunately, when you're done, you'd have to transfer them to a storage drive, thereby wasting time deleting them from the catalog and re-importing them. (AFAIK), and in my experience, none of the Adobe photo programs, (Photoshop, PSE, or Lightroom), will allow you to move entire folders, only individual images, and that's where the snafu comes in.

PS: I'm going to fact check myself on that last paragraph, and I suggest you do as well. (I honestly may not have tried hard enough in the past).
 
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Thanks for your honest response.

Now if you went FULL 950 Pro (M.2) and 850 Pro SSDs, meaning all drives in said computer were SSD, would that really make these real world processes that much faster? Even internet, router and any off computer work would theoretically slow you down. I'm dreaming of the day when SSDs are cheaper than HDDs and internet speeds are gigahertz or faster. For now a fast boot SSD is about as good as it gets.
 
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