Class-leading M.2 NVMe Performance
For the majority of existing 950 Pro owners, jumping to Samsung's new 960 Pro series probably isn't worth the investment. Unless you are interested in increasing the storage of your current drive, there isn't a whole lot of incentive to upgrade. If anything, that's a testament to the speed and reliability of Samsung's 950 Pro, which was extraordinary enough to have received our Outstanding award late last year.
Although it isn't quite as groundbreaking, the 960 Pro 1TB still delivered great results. Its 7-Zip file extraction test was particularly impressive, as were the drive's file copy tests.
For those wondering, for the time being we have shied away from including Windows boot time and game level load time tests. Some time ago we discovered that high-speed SSDs were no longer a bottleneck here and before long every drive was performing well within a second of each other – hardly conducive to demonstrating the performance difference between products.
Without question, Samsung's latest 'prosumer' SSD delivers the best M.2 NVMe performance we've seen to date. At $629, the 1TB model might seem expensive but in terms of performance nothing in the consumer space can hold a candle to it.
Not only that, but this 1TB model comes in at the exact same cost per gigabyte as the 950 Pro 512GB, which should make it clear which generation to buy if you're due for an upgrade.
No performance inconsistencies were revealed by our battery of tests and therefore the 960 Pro series appears to have no real weakness. Admittedly we've only had the drive on hand for a day or so, so there is certainly much more testing to be done.
Based on initial impressions, the 960 Pro series looks to be a solid successor. Having boldly recommended Samsung's 960 Pro 2TB in our PC Buying Guide's "Extreme Machine", it looks like we made the right choice there. In fact, we should go ahead and replace the 950 Pro from the Luxury System with the equivalent 960 Pro model as well.
Overall, great stuff once again from Samsung, and we'll be eagerly waiting to see what, if anything can dethrone this new M.2 king over the coming months.
Pros: Class-leading M.2 NVMe performance. Nice capacity range. Excellent endurance ratings. Only 80mm long (even the 2TB model). Five-year warranty.
Cons: In our treasured 24 hours with the 960 Pro, we are struggling to come up with a con. While it is competitively priced, it can't hurt to ask for a discount ;).