Samsung introduces 960 EVO and 960 Pro SSDs
Samsung introduced two new NVME drives at its annual SSD Summit in Seoul. The 960 EVO is aimed at the discerning consumer, while the 960 Pro will be the new flagship model of the Korean company. Both drives are NVME SSDs with PCIe x4 interface.
Last year at the SSD Summit, Samsung announced the 950 Pro SSD with capacities up to 1TB. The largest capacity never came on the market, but the smaller variants did. The new drives should come in capacities up to 1TB for the 960 EVO, while the 960 Pro should be available in capacities up to 2TB. The drives will be available as m.2 drives, with a pcie x4 interface and controlled by a Polaris nvme controller. The 960 Pro is similar to the SM961 OEM drive, while the 960 EVO is nearly identical to the PM961, also an OEM drive.
The retail consumer versions will be distinguished by different packaging, but more important is Samsung’s software on the retail drives, the so-called Rapid Mode and TurboWrite. This involves a dram and pseudo-slc caching layer respectively to improve performance. The EVO drive combines the Polaris controller with tlc memory while the Pro variant uses faster mlc memory. Both series use 3d-nand with 48 layers, while the 950 Pro introduced last year had to make do with 32-layer nand. The Pro drive has a five year warranty or 1200tbw, the EVO version comes with a three year warranty or 400tbw.
The 960 Pro series will be available from October in capacities of 512GB, 1TB and 2TB and should achieve sequential speeds of up to 3500MB/s for read and 2100MB/s for write, while those speeds for the 960 EVO using TurboWrite technology are 3200MB respectively. /s and 2100MB/s. The write speeds of the EVO drives without TurboWrite are 300MB/s for the 250GB version, 600MB/s for the 500GB version and 1200MB/s for the 1TB version. In both series, a Dynamic Thermal Guard technology must balance performance and thermal throttling.
There are no European suggested retail prices yet, but dollar prices for the 960 Pro start at $330 for the 512GB version and the smallest 250GB 960 EVO should be paid $130.
| seq. read | 3200MB/s | 3200MB/s | 3200MB/s | 3500MB/s | 3500MB/s | 3500MB/s |
| seq. to write | 1500MB/s | 1800MB/s | 1900MB/s | 2100MB/s | 2100MB/s | 2100MB/s |
| 4k read (qd=1, 1 thread) | 14.000iops | 14.000iops | 14.000iops | 14.000iops | 14.000iops | 14.000iops |
| 4k write (qd=1, 1 thread) | 50,000iops | 50,000iops | 50,000iops | 50,000iops | 50,000iops | 50,000iops |
| 4k read (qd=4.64 thread) | 330,000iops | 330,000iops | 380,000iops | 330,000iops | 440,000iops | 440,000iops |
| 4k write (qd=4.64 thread) | 300,000iops | 330,000iops | 360.000iops | 330,000iops | 360.000iops | 360.000iops |
| ddr3 cache | 512MB | 512MB | 1GB | 512MB | 1GB | 2GB |
| Tbw | 100TB | 200TB | 400TB | 400TB | 800TB | 1200TB |
| Price | $129 | $249 | $479 | $329 | $629 | 1299 dollars |