Samsung SSD 960 Pro NVMe M.2 Review: Blazing Fast, Solid State Storage
Samsung SSD 960 Pro - The Verdict
Performance Summary: The Samsung SSD 960 Pro performed exceptionally well throughout our entire battery of tests. It wasn’t a clean sweep across the board in every benchmark – a few other drives like the Intel SSD 750 and OCZ RD400 pulled ahead in a couple of the 4K transfer tests at various queue depths – but with larger transfers and sequential transfers, the Samsung SSD 960 Pro put up some huge numbers, and access times were among the best we’ve seen as well. The SSD 960 Pro also outperformed the other drives in the trace-based PCMark Storage benchmark.
We should note that we used Samsung’s NVMe driver for testing. With the stock Windows 10 driver, performance was still very good, but not quite at good in tests like PCMark and HD Tune. PCMark especially showed much better performance with the Samsung driver.
The Samsung SSD 960 Pro is a beast. If you regularly move large amounts of data around, it is the highest performing consumer-class solid state drive available. The drive just barely missed hitting the 3.5GB/s mark Samsung lists in its specifications (by only a few MB/s) for reads, but actually squeaked past the 2.1GB/s mark for writes, which placed the SSD 960 Pro clearly at the top of the charts versus other drives in its class.
Some key specs and pricing for the three capacities being offered are listed in the chart above. If you break down the MSRPs into cost per gigabyte, the various Samsung SSD 960 Pro drives will be priced at about $.63 - $.65 per gigabyte. That puts them on the higher end of the price spectrum versus most other M.2 NVMe consumer-class solid state drives, but the Samsung SSD 960 Pro’s performance easily justifies the premium. The upcoming SSD 960 EVO will be priced lower, however. We hope to evaluate one of those drives soon as well.
In the end, Samsung’s got another winner in its storage line-up. The Samsung SSD 960 Pro offers class-leading performance, high endurance, and a solid 5-year warranty. You can’t ask for much more.
 |  |
|
|
