Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark 3.0
Using CrystalDiskMark to measure sequential read performance we see that the Samsung SSD 960 Evo 500GB is 20% slower than the 960 Pro, that said it still pushed 2GB/s, which is an impressive result despite being slower than last year's 950 Pro and it makes the 960 Evo almost 4x faster than the very best SATA SSDs.
Despite the use of TLC memory, the sequential write performance is particularly impressive. Here the 960 Evo was just 4% slower than the 960 Pro and 13% faster than the 950 Pro. Moreover, it was more than 3x faster than the very best SATA SSDs.
The 960 Evo might have been 23% slower than the 960 Pro for the random 512K read test but with a throughout of almost 1GB/s it was still fast – just 9% slower than Intel's 750 Pro series.
Once again the 960 Evo looks strong when comparing write performance. This time the random 512K write result hit 1.4GB/s making it just 6% slower than the 960 Pro and almost 3x faster than the fastest SATA SSD.
Interestingly, when measuring 4K read performance the 960 Evo delivered our strongest result seen yet hitting 63MB/s. This actually made it 11% faster than the 960 Pro and 15% faster than the 950 Pro, so pretty impressive stuff here.
Again we see incredible 4K performance from the 960 Evo series as the 500GB drive hit 224MB/s in this write test, or 15% faster than the 960 Pro and 23% faster than the 950 Pro.