Samsung 960 PRO M.2 1TB NVMe SSD review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

It never ceases to amaze me how fast NVMe related technology is advancing. The new 960 Pro series show it all. Now you will have noticed that in certain conditions performance was a notch below the 950 Pro and in other it tore it a new hole. This I am afraid is not the nature of the beast, slowly but steadily we are running into anomalies with test software as well as by design. I do not think that any developer expected storage technology running over a simple PCI-Express interface would be this fast anno 2016. It is seriously staggering to see where we are headed in terms of performance for NAND based flash storage units. For motherboards the industry will need to move to SATA4 rapidly with a serious increase in broad specced bandwidth to be able to keep up with M.2 and NVMe. As you have been able to see, the Samsung 960 Pro is a product that offers insane performance in both reads and writes relative to what you pay for it. At close to 1 and in certain conditions even 2 GB/s writes per seconds it is still four times as fast as any SATA3, while topping 3 GB/s reads here and there and thus more than quadrupling that number compared to a SATA3 SSD.Things remain relative though, your OC is working at a certain speed due to your processor and memory. So the question rises, would you ever notice any difference in-between a 950 Pro and 960 Pro? No we doubt it very much. The Difference over a SATA3 SSD however is certainly noticeable, but again something relative as experience as a regular SSD already does workloads in split second timings. 

There is more to it than just performance though, this PRO model is offered at pretty endurance numbers, 800 TB written is guaranteed for the tested 1TB model and combined with a 5 year warranty that should bring a smile to your face. 800 TB I mean ..  if you write say 20 GB a day / 365 days a year that would be 7.3 TB per year. So that's over 109 years of lifespan easily. For the 2TB model that number is higher at 1200 TB written, that my fellow gurus is beyond Enterprise server grade classification.

Performance

Overall the new 960 PRO storage units shine at many of not any factor and on all levels really, IOPS performance is very good though we could not reach the advertised numbers. This SSD writes and reads serious amounts of tiny files in a very fast fashion. We stated it before though, IOPS is not something you as a consumer should worry about too much unless you are doing a lot of database related work or create similar workloads on your PC, but this SSD certainly ranks high within this aspect. Trace testing - we think by far the best test in our entire benchmark suite is PCMark Vantage 64-bit. This is a trace test and can emulate what you guys do on your PC but then multiplied by a factor of 100, this test puts more focus on read performance opposed to writing though. The outcome of the results with the Samsung 960 PRO is very good, exceptional even. Sustained read / write performance, again excellent. Read performance in particular leads and is top ranking. Overall the series is impressive. Zoom in at both IOPS and trace performance and you'll notice that the SSD can manage serious workloads without breaking so much as a drop of sweat. So whether you write lots of small files, copy big 8GB MKV movies in 10 seconds or do it all together, the 960 PRO remains a top dog on all fronts.

Overall NAND Storage Usage

Any SSD is enjoyable, very much so. If you put a drive like this into your compatible PC, you'll have no idea what is about to hit you. We very much enjoy the grand sustained performance of this SSD series; if you copy a vast amount of compressed data, then the 950 PRO will perform seriously fast in performance. Make no mistake, replacing a HDD with an SSD in your PC eliminates the random access lag of the HDD head, it is no longer mechanical. That combined with the performance SATA3 / M.2 offers these days is simply a massive difference and probably the best upgrade you can make for your computer anno 2016.

Pricing & Warranty

Making your own SSD with your own controller, own PCB, own cache chips and own NAND flash memory does have advantages as Samsung is able to keep the prices very competitive as this product is made 99% in-house. Compared to the launch price of the 950 Pro the 960 Pro series is a tiny bit cheaper, but definitely not cheap.

• Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB - MZ-V6P2T0BW costs 1299 USD (63 cents per GB)
• Samsung SSD 960 PRO 1TB - MZ-V6P1T0BW costs 629 USD (61 cents per GB)
• Samsung SSD 960 PRO 512GB - MZ-V6P2T0BW costs 329 USD (64 cents per GB)

These are prices incl. VAT (MSRP). The 1TB version is the most economical one of the three. So yes, this remains to be a high-end price but for what is a very an enthusiast class performing M.2 SSD with excellent endurance.  You'll receive a five year carry-in warranty with this drive, which we feel is very comfortable alongside the 400 TB, 800 or 1200 TB written respectively.

Concluding

In the end I feel you'll never notice the difference in-between a 950 Pro or 960 Pro. However you could have workloads on your PC that require  insanely fast reads or writes, and yes the 960 Pro series just shines light and bright alright. The numbers that NVMe based M2 units produce these days are staggering and impressive. We would like to see that price drop below 50 cents per GB though, as that does feel a little more fair. Going from a fast SATA3 SSD towards the 960 pro again is a step that will be much faster, but fact remains a proper regular SSD is already loading your applications in a split second with your processor and memory being the new bottleneck. How fast do these SSDs really need to be ? Well let me answer that in threefold - 1. they can never be fast enough and 2. they can never be big enough and 3. they can never be reliable enough.  Samsung offers the magic combo. You will (give or take) more than quadruple your read performance over a regular SATA3 SSD. For writes that is double to quadruple as well (depending on workload). Remember, there are requirements for proper M.2 usage though. You do need to use the right combination of OS/UEFI motherboard and CPU, we do recommend last gen X99 (with Haswell-E or Broadwell-E) and Z97/Z170 or newer gear here. Check with your motherboard manufacturers if the board can support M.2 with four PCI-Express lanes (Gen 3.0) and the NVMe protocol. With the Samsung 960 Pro series you receive a five year carry-in warranty. Whatever you are planning with this storage unit, you are good to go from gaming, overall net pc usage (albeit total overkill) to video transcoding and editing and content creation, this is by far one of the fastest SSD series available for hugely I/O intensive workloads, consumer grade that is. If your motherboard supports it and if you are in the market for something really fast and do not care about the price premium, hey man it's a top pick. Highly recommended. 

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