Samsung 960 PRO M.2 1TB NVMe SSD review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon DSLR shooting 12 MegaPixel photos. Right then, packaging.
 

As always we start off with packaging. Samsung uses a nice black packaging with red marking the Pro series. Inside the lightweight package we have the 1TB sample. Performance is listed as 3500 MB/s for reads and 2100 MB/sec for writes with roughly 360K IOPS at 4k random writes QD32 aligned disk access with our tested model. For the 512GB model these would be 330K IOPS however with similar sequential performance.

Above, the tested unit; you should easily be able to place the M.2 unit into a compatible motherboard. Most X99/Z97/Z170 boards support it, so yes newer X99s do as well. You should however check out with the motherboard manufacturer if you have a x4 lane PCIe version with NVMe protocol support. The latest windows 10 iteration has an up-to date NVMe 1.2 protocol driver natively, so you do not need to install a 3rd party driver. 

 
The compact M.2 2280 form factor ensures compatibility with next-generation desktop and mobile platforms that support the M.2 PCIe slot and interface. And yes, the backside reveals no components used. On the next page we'll look under stat sticker and you will be surprised by a thing or two. 
  

8cm, yup that's the M.2 2280 form factor. We'll use the M.2 unit on an X99 platform. The unit can also withstand physical shock of up to 1500G/0.5ms and vibrations up to 20G. The controller once again runs hot though, we'll show you that with a thermal image.
 

 
Samsung offers a 5-year limited warranty up to 400 / 800 / 1200 Terabytes written (TBW) for the 512 GB, 1TB and 2TB versions (respectively). That is pretty terrific endurance TBH.