I've never seen such a demand for nvme ssd like samsung 960 evo. They are sold only on preorders basis. Looks like the only available capacity is 250GB https://www.span.com/search/960_space_evo/-Samsung
The 960 EVO is today, what the 850 EVO was a couple of years ago. Buying anything else makes little sense. The 850 EVO is still today an excellent SSD with a fantastic price/performance ratio. I am happy to see such impressive improvements: I only hope we don't need to wait 2 years to see some worthy competitor ...
Only if you have 480 USD to spend on a 1 TB SSD. If you don't (and many people don't need those read/write speeds), then something like the Mushkin Reactor 1 TB can be had for half the cost.
While I agree, it's a bit of apples to oranges. The reactor is a sata III SSD, not a NVMe class SSD. Compared to other NVMe drives, the 960 evo is a great performance per dollar value.
The pci.e speed only matters if you move with huge chunks of data such as a high res video editing. For pretty much anything else it offers nothing over sata ssd's.
"The pci.e speed only matters if you move with huge chunks of data such as a high res video editing. For pretty much anything else it offers nothing over sata ssd's."
In which case, you'd want something that won't throttle under heavy load like the Intel 750. Otherwise, the 600P makes more sense in M.2 form (if it remains cheaper than the 960 EVO).
While I agree that both SSD's are fantastic performers (I bought a 500GB 850 Evo), I don't think that your statement on buying other products is right. Some users cannot afford either, and a cheaper SSD would provide a nice uplift.
The 860 EVO is selling around 20% more than the 850 EVO did at launch. Just because its NVMe doesn't mean Samsung can milk that much more out of it, the Intel 600p is NVMe and it cost almost half the price. And...Intel. I get that Samsung has improved tremendously in SSD reliability but many of us still have a sour butthole from the 840 TLC drives they never really fixed and honestly, we're comparing Porsches to Ferraris here. Nobody is going to notice the difference between these drives is day-to-day tasks.
"And...Intel" Can't say I really agree with this "default" view since I happened to see the end-of-life behavior for some Intel SSD's. This was some years ago (4-5) so the experience might not be relevant now but for multiple SSDs when they got close to their end of life I just got a warning popup in Windows to back up my data. That's it. I foolishly made the assumption that I can just image the SSD to speed up the process only to realize after the reboot that the SSD controller just killed itself on shutdown.
This isn't the kind of behavior you expect from any data storage medium. The explanation was that Intel was trying to avoid data loss from the drive just failing due to wear. And they chose to mitigate this by triggering data loss by design choice.
While the price and performance may be good I still have to think twice (or more) when considering Intel SSDs.
Wow interesting I've come across dozens of X25-M's and lowest health I've seen was 77% in Intel SSD Toolbox and that was a 300GB SSD320 in an exchange server. The MDB was over 100GB
Have to agree; that's completely unacceptable behavior. Samsung's 840 Pro (I think it was) went way, way beyond its rated life in the TechReport test (over 1 petabyte) before finally giving up the ghost. If the Intel in question bricked itself based on published ratings, it could have cut its useful life in half. I don't know if that's how it did it... a better way (that it could feasibly have also used) would be to issue the warning when most or all of the overprovisioned spare cells have been deployed to replace those that have worn out (which ought to be a sure sign that all of the cells are close to the edge because of wear leveling)... but if anything, it should go read-only, not brick itself.
Billy Tallis, can you make a QD1 comparison graph alongside the mix of 1,2,4? Because average end user pretty much only cares for 4k QD1, RR, the mixed stat is more niche and not indicative. Thanks.
I think that often Apple use a couple of different suppliers for their SSDs (certainly was the case when I bought my Air ages ago) and they're unlikely to hand out samples for testing as if there's one thing Apple seems to hate, it's scrutiny. This means that you might have to buy quite a few Macbooks, ID the SSD and then you'd still never know if they were using one, two, three or even four different suppliers unless you got loads of people to run the appropriate software and then went on a shopping spree. Hoping of course that you could return those you've unpacked, set up, tested and carefully repackaged.... Whilst it'd be nice, Apple don't make it easy and unless you're loaded it's not going to be practical.
Apple sourced SSDs from Samsung, SanDisk and Toshiba back when they used SATA SSDs, but went 100% Samsung when they switched to PCIe. The 2015 MBPs were all SM951, for instance. From what I've seen thus far, the 2016 MBPs use a new, in-house designed PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe controller paired with SanDisk NAND.
And I take that back that last bit because I just saw a post with a photo of the internals of the MBP w/ TouchBar and it looked to have a Samsung SSD on board.
There's a quick fix for that: an ugly PCIe adapter with a heatsink. Or actually slapping some RAM heatsinks on the drive itself. I've been looking for a 2x M.2 to PCIe x8 adapter. The only ones I've found are expensive server adapters. Considering one of these drives nearly saturates 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes it seems that a regular consumer who wants to do RAID 0 should run their GPU in x8 (or go all out on HEDT) and get two PCIe adapters with heatsinks.
More performance = more power. It would be neat if they made different power profiles that could be set by the user through the OS. I don't want 5W pulled from my laptop just for my SSD to read 2 GB/s but I also don't need it to run that quickly.
NVMe already has that feature. Drives can define multiple power states, both operational and non-operational idle. The definition of those power states can include information about the relative performance impact on read and write throughput and latency, and how long it takes to enter and leave the different idle power states. For example, the 960 Pro declares a full-power operational power state with maximum power draw of up to 6.9W, and restricted operational power states with limits of 5.5W and 5.1W. It also declares two non-operational idle power states with limits of 0.05W and 0.008W, which my measurements have haven't accurately captured.
Making full use of this capability requires better support on the software side.
I use nvme-cli on Linux to manually test these settings, and there's a patch working its way toward a stable kernel release that will let supporting drives automatically make use of their various idle states. I'm not aware of any Windows tools that give the same degree of fine-grained control, but Intel's tools for enterprise SSDs and the 750 have some power management options.
That would be nice. I'd love to be able to set my 950 pro to a max of, say 2 watt on battery, or set the maximum speed to sata III speed (on battery), if it meant better battery life, and enable full speed when on mains power.
Yeh I noted the thermal limits kicking in and I did wonder if there's any major benefit from hacking these things, putting on some thermal goop, a big heat sink and a fan. Obviously it'll probably not help in the majority of cases but the mentalist part of me was pondering just how much performance there is to be unlocked.
Why do you not show consistent results. In some tests you include the Intel 750 and on other you exclude it in the graph. You excluded the Intel 750 in the power consumption both times. Are you not able to calculate the power being used when the Intel drive is being used?
The Intel 750 doesn't have power data in Bench. My guess would be that the current power benchmarks post-date when the review sample was returned.
Sometimes there are oversights, but most of the time when some devices are only shown in a subset of the charts its because data to score them on the others isn't available. Most often due to moving testsuite targets or breaking changes in the benchmark applications.
Yeah, the Intel 750 was tested by Kristian before we had working PCIe power measurement. It also complicates things by using both the 12V and 3.3V rails, when I only have one meter. Adding power consumption data isn't a high priority for me, because the Intel 750 is always in last place, by a lot: its idle power is higher than the load power of most M.2 drives on many of the tests. The Intel 750 would distort the scale of the power graphs to the point that it would be hard to see the differences between the M.2 drives.
How are M.2 drives mounted during these reviews? Do you use the motherboard's M.2 connector? A PCIe adapter without a heatsink? A PCIe adapter with a heatsink?
Unless otherwise specified, M.2 PCIe drives are tested in a simple Lycom DT-120 adapter, which is connected to the riser card used for power measurement, which is in turn connected to the primary PCIe 3.0 x16 slot. Drives like the OCZ RD400A and Plextor M8PeY are also tested in their bundled adapter cards with whatever heatsink that provides, and any other M.2+heatsink results I report are using the Angelbird Wings PX1 adapter and heatsink.
First, it is the drive that will likely play a role in making M.2 SSDs a much more popular form factor, perhaps to the point where NVMe drives overtake SATA. Most people do not need the write endurance that the MLC SSDs have.
Second, the performance is quite good, and although there is still a huge price premium over SATA SSDs, the massive performance increase is much more justifiable in terms of cost premium compared to say, the 960 Pro, which is for people who want the best. It will remain that way, until the 970 Pro and Evo come out, or perhaps until a 3D XPoint SSD comes out.
Third, I expect an enterprise version to come out too, with power loss protection. The only real issue i see is if there is something like the 840 Evo that caused performance drops, but so far Samsung's TLC drives since then have been solid.
I see no mention of Samsung's silent delays of these drives. As of now most models of both the pro and evo are listed as ship by late December or January.
Kind of disappointing you would gloss over a 2-3 month delay like that.
I went with the 600P 1TB instead.. had it for 2 weeks now.. I love it. Being M.2 I didn't buy it for heavy workloads anyway so it won't throttle. But if I needed performance I'd go with the Intel 750 instead of what I got.
Interesting to see the rate at which these continue to progress, and I'm glad Samsung continues to ramp performance aggressively. One thing I wish you could find some way to integrate is at least a summary of reliability features like how a drive handles power loss, and (depending on feasibility if you are mainly testing short-term loaners) maybe some followup a few months down the line with longer term performance/reliability observations. While Samsung has long been at or near the pinnacle of out-of-box raw performance, they've also had a history of playing a bit fast and loose with reliability and support, and I think that deserves some sort of recognition. I have a lot of Intel 730s that replaced or were chosen over Samsung drives of the time after a number of poor experiences with the long term usage 840 series for example, and while the 840s were superior in many respects on paper and Day 1, by Day 100+ and under stress they developed issues that were not immediately apparent.
Also, a small typo on the final page, looks like at least one of the $/GB (the 750@1TB) isn't right.
I am working on some longer-term data and performance retention testing, but the amount of extra equipment that requires means not many drives will get that treatment. Unexpected power loss testing might be more feasible, but for the near future the testbed is too busy for me to add something like this to the routine.
The Intel 750 doesn't fit conveniently in the price comparison chart because of its unusual capacities. The prices listed are for the 400GB and 1.2TB models, and the 800GB model isn't listed in the table.
Speaking of long-term data retention...... If I had 2 SSD's, one unplugged and stored in a closet and one plugged in with power on but idle and unused, would the one plugged in retain data longer even though it is unused????
This is magnificent! Not only has Samsung produced an SSD that under performs its own previous generation product but one that manages to do so while using even MORE power at an even HIGHER price per GB! They even put it on a form factor that makes the drive almost entirely irrelevant! The only thing missing is a feature that makes the modules randomly explode upon contact with the users computer.
The 960 Pro is much better price over the duration of Warranty
I can generally kill 1 out of 4 SSD's within the warranty period
so if I buy 4 960 Pro's and 4-960 EVO's, here is the breakdown @ 500GB
4-960 Pro's = $330 X 4 or $1320 divided by 5yr warranty = $264 per year for 5 years or 4-960 EVO's = $250 X 4 or $1000 divided by 3 years = $333.33 per year for 3 years
per year cost under warranty is WAY better for the PRO!
3 year warranty with TLC just doesn't do it for me
I would REALLY need to be trying to kill at least 1 out of 4 but I could prolly do it
So tell me more about the internal speed Billy..... How many seconds does it take to copy and paste 100GB to and from the same 960EVO? and from the 960PRO?
Why wasn't the 256gb version tested? Tom reviewed it and it was kinda meh compared to the rest of the mlc drives, it was as bad as the 600p in some cases.
Just received my 960 Pro today, installed and everything is working properly apart from the Samsung driver. Have spent the last 40mins trying to locate the NVME 2.0 driver to no avail. Would anyone have a link to it yet? Or is it still unavailable and coming with the new magician software at the end of the month?
Idk that's a bit funny then, the original drivers (For the 950 pro) failed to detect my 960 pro for some reason. It's been installed and is booting as my OS drive too, just using the Microsoft driver!
And yeah, was the 512GB that I ordered, couldn't exactly justify getting the higher capacities after just spending more then $4000 on a new triple monitor setup haha
It has only gotten more impractical to build a valid and reproducible application benchmark suite, to the point that any such system would have to be cut off from the Internet to prevent automatic updates from changing the conditions of the test.
From the perspective of the SSD, our ATSB trace-based tests present a nearly identical workload to running the applications themselves, but with far better reproducibility. It might be possible to improve how we present the results of those three tests, but I do not believe that splitting those traces into a dozen different scenarios would make it any easier to come to a purchasing decision than by considering the measurements we currently report.
I'm currently using an 850 EVO on my ASUS X99 Pro motherboard. Will my mobo fully support the 960? Also, is it better to do a fresh Windows 10 install on an NVMe drive, or does cloning still work well?
I don't understand, anandtech's using Z97 Deluxe for benchmark but it only supports 10Gbps M.2 Bandwidth, right? So theoretically, you didn't push 960 to its max performance. Anyone care to explain?
The motherboard's built-in M.2 slot is not used, because it does not permit measuring power consumption. M.2 PCIe drives are connected through an adapter and riser card to the primary PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, which will continue to be sufficient until PCIe 4 SSDs and motherboards arrive.
It seems these drives are delayed because of NAND shortage. But what about the driver and the Magician software ? There is a lack or delay of some kind? If these items work and benefit former models, I see no reason for this delay after delay. Needless to say they play in my decission to buy a 960Pro when available, I'll wait for some advances here. Very dissapointing.
Where are the RAIDs? I want a RAID-5 enclosure with 5 of these drives with Thunderbolt 3 connector for video editing. Why does all RAID-enclosures still use SATA?
"As is normal for Samsung's EVO lines, the usable capacities are a bit smaller, with the 1TB EVO being 1000GB instead of 1024GB." It is norma for the whole world except Microsoft and some others : 1 TB is 1000 GB, just like 1TW is 1000 GW. (On the other hand 1 TiB is 1024 GiB notice the "i" between the T and the B ?)
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SaolDan - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Neat!jwhannell - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Do wantnathanddrews - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
can hazedward1987 - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link
I've never seen such a demand for nvme ssd like samsung 960 evo. They are sold only on preorders basis. Looks like the only available capacity is 250GB https://www.span.com/search/960_space_evo/-SamsungEKFxWtB - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Yea!yankeeDDL - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
The 960 EVO is today, what the 850 EVO was a couple of years ago. Buying anything else makes little sense.The 850 EVO is still today an excellent SSD with a fantastic price/performance ratio.
I am happy to see such impressive improvements: I only hope we don't need to wait 2 years to see some worthy competitor ...
Ninhalem - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Only if you have 480 USD to spend on a 1 TB SSD. If you don't (and many people don't need those read/write speeds), then something like the Mushkin Reactor 1 TB can be had for half the cost.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
While I agree, it's a bit of apples to oranges. The reactor is a sata III SSD, not a NVMe class SSD. Compared to other NVMe drives, the 960 evo is a great performance per dollar value.ImSpartacus - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I think the confusion arises from the op not specifying that he was only talking about nvme m.2 drives.ddriver - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
It doesn't really matter when the speed doesn't result in any tangible practical improvements.Lolimaster - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
The pci.e speed only matters if you move with huge chunks of data such as a high res video editing. For pretty much anything else it offers nothing over sata ssd's.Flying Aardvark - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
"The pci.e speed only matters if you move with huge chunks of data such as a high res video editing. For pretty much anything else it offers nothing over sata ssd's."In which case, you'd want something that won't throttle under heavy load like the Intel 750. Otherwise, the 600P makes more sense in M.2 form (if it remains cheaper than the 960 EVO).
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
While I agree that both SSD's are fantastic performers (I bought a 500GB 850 Evo), I don't think that your statement on buying other products is right. Some users cannot afford either, and a cheaper SSD would provide a nice uplift.Samus - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
The 860 EVO is selling around 20% more than the 850 EVO did at launch. Just because its NVMe doesn't mean Samsung can milk that much more out of it, the Intel 600p is NVMe and it cost almost half the price. And...Intel. I get that Samsung has improved tremendously in SSD reliability but many of us still have a sour butthole from the 840 TLC drives they never really fixed and honestly, we're comparing Porsches to Ferraris here. Nobody is going to notice the difference between these drives is day-to-day tasks.close - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
"And...Intel"Can't say I really agree with this "default" view since I happened to see the end-of-life behavior for some Intel SSD's. This was some years ago (4-5) so the experience might not be relevant now but for multiple SSDs when they got close to their end of life I just got a warning popup in Windows to back up my data. That's it. I foolishly made the assumption that I can just image the SSD to speed up the process only to realize after the reboot that the SSD controller just killed itself on shutdown.
This isn't the kind of behavior you expect from any data storage medium. The explanation was that Intel was trying to avoid data loss from the drive just failing due to wear. And they chose to mitigate this by triggering data loss by design choice.
While the price and performance may be good I still have to think twice (or more) when considering Intel SSDs.
Phattio - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
@close: thank you for posting this. good to know!Samus - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Wow interesting I've come across dozens of X25-M's and lowest health I've seen was 77% in Intel SSD Toolbox and that was a 300GB SSD320 in an exchange server. The MDB was over 100GBAscaris - Friday, December 16, 2016 - link
Have to agree; that's completely unacceptable behavior. Samsung's 840 Pro (I think it was) went way, way beyond its rated life in the TechReport test (over 1 petabyte) before finally giving up the ghost. If the Intel in question bricked itself based on published ratings, it could have cut its useful life in half. I don't know if that's how it did it... a better way (that it could feasibly have also used) would be to issue the warning when most or all of the overprovisioned spare cells have been deployed to replace those that have worn out (which ought to be a sure sign that all of the cells are close to the edge because of wear leveling)... but if anything, it should go read-only, not brick itself.DrunkenDonkey - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Billy Tallis, can you make a QD1 comparison graph alongside the mix of 1,2,4? Because average end user pretty much only cares for 4k QD1, RR, the mixed stat is more niche and not indicative. Thanks.Flying Aardvark - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Seconded. Reads like an ad otherwise.Foralin - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I'd like to see this kind of analisys for the new Macbook Pro's SSDphilehidiot - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I think that often Apple use a couple of different suppliers for their SSDs (certainly was the case when I bought my Air ages ago) and they're unlikely to hand out samples for testing as if there's one thing Apple seems to hate, it's scrutiny. This means that you might have to buy quite a few Macbooks, ID the SSD and then you'd still never know if they were using one, two, three or even four different suppliers unless you got loads of people to run the appropriate software and then went on a shopping spree. Hoping of course that you could return those you've unpacked, set up, tested and carefully repackaged.... Whilst it'd be nice, Apple don't make it easy and unless you're loaded it's not going to be practical.repoman27 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Apple sourced SSDs from Samsung, SanDisk and Toshiba back when they used SATA SSDs, but went 100% Samsung when they switched to PCIe. The 2015 MBPs were all SM951, for instance. From what I've seen thus far, the 2016 MBPs use a new, in-house designed PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe controller paired with SanDisk NAND.repoman27 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
And I take that back that last bit because I just saw a post with a photo of the internals of the MBP w/ TouchBar and it looked to have a Samsung SSD on board.Threska - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
One disadvantage I see of the M.2 form-factor is inadequate cooling on some motherboards, compared to their more traditional SSD brethren.willis936 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
There's a quick fix for that: an ugly PCIe adapter with a heatsink. Or actually slapping some RAM heatsinks on the drive itself. I've been looking for a 2x M.2 to PCIe x8 adapter. The only ones I've found are expensive server adapters. Considering one of these drives nearly saturates 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes it seems that a regular consumer who wants to do RAID 0 should run their GPU in x8 (or go all out on HEDT) and get two PCIe adapters with heatsinks.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
The issue is that is only possible on desktops. Laptops are more SOL in this regard.willis936 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
More performance = more power. It would be neat if they made different power profiles that could be set by the user through the OS. I don't want 5W pulled from my laptop just for my SSD to read 2 GB/s but I also don't need it to run that quickly.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
That's a nifty idea! I would like that too :)Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
NVMe already has that feature. Drives can define multiple power states, both operational and non-operational idle. The definition of those power states can include information about the relative performance impact on read and write throughput and latency, and how long it takes to enter and leave the different idle power states. For example, the 960 Pro declares a full-power operational power state with maximum power draw of up to 6.9W, and restricted operational power states with limits of 5.5W and 5.1W. It also declares two non-operational idle power states with limits of 0.05W and 0.008W, which my measurements have haven't accurately captured.Making full use of this capability requires better support on the software side.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Is there currently any consumer software that can change these settings?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I use nvme-cli on Linux to manually test these settings, and there's a patch working its way toward a stable kernel release that will let supporting drives automatically make use of their various idle states. I'm not aware of any Windows tools that give the same degree of fine-grained control, but Intel's tools for enterprise SSDs and the 750 have some power management options.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
That would be nice. I'd love to be able to set my 950 pro to a max of, say 2 watt on battery, or set the maximum speed to sata III speed (on battery), if it meant better battery life, and enable full speed when on mains power.philehidiot - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Yeh I noted the thermal limits kicking in and I did wonder if there's any major benefit from hacking these things, putting on some thermal goop, a big heat sink and a fan. Obviously it'll probably not help in the majority of cases but the mentalist part of me was pondering just how much performance there is to be unlocked.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
The fan would be a bit of overkill, but the 950 pro showed some gains with a passive heatsink installed. The 960 would probably benefit even more.philehidiot - Tuesday, November 22, 2016 - link
Time to break out the liquid nitrogen. If anyone at work asks where it has all gone I'll just say I was remove the mother of all warts from a patient.philehidiot - Tuesday, November 22, 2016 - link
*removing. Bloody spelling.nagi603 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
A shame they dropped the write endurance to half of the 950!TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
TLC vs MLCbull2760 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Why do you not show consistent results. In some tests you include the Intel 750 and on other you exclude it in the graph. You excluded the Intel 750 in the power consumption both times. Are you not able to calculate the power being used when the Intel drive is being used?DanNeely - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
The Intel 750 doesn't have power data in Bench. My guess would be that the current power benchmarks post-date when the review sample was returned.Sometimes there are oversights, but most of the time when some devices are only shown in a subset of the charts its because data to score them on the others isn't available. Most often due to moving testsuite targets or breaking changes in the benchmark applications.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD15/1440
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1458
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Yeah, the Intel 750 was tested by Kristian before we had working PCIe power measurement. It also complicates things by using both the 12V and 3.3V rails, when I only have one meter. Adding power consumption data isn't a high priority for me, because the Intel 750 is always in last place, by a lot: its idle power is higher than the load power of most M.2 drives on many of the tests. The Intel 750 would distort the scale of the power graphs to the point that it would be hard to see the differences between the M.2 drives.willis936 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
How are M.2 drives mounted during these reviews? Do you use the motherboard's M.2 connector? A PCIe adapter without a heatsink? A PCIe adapter with a heatsink?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Unless otherwise specified, M.2 PCIe drives are tested in a simple Lycom DT-120 adapter, which is connected to the riser card used for power measurement, which is in turn connected to the primary PCIe 3.0 x16 slot. Drives like the OCZ RD400A and Plextor M8PeY are also tested in their bundled adapter cards with whatever heatsink that provides, and any other M.2+heatsink results I report are using the Angelbird Wings PX1 adapter and heatsink.R3MF - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Is that v2.0 driver available on day one?(for Windows7 users wanting to do a fresh install)
CrazyElf - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
First, it is the drive that will likely play a role in making M.2 SSDs a much more popular form factor, perhaps to the point where NVMe drives overtake SATA. Most people do not need the write endurance that the MLC SSDs have.Second, the performance is quite good, and although there is still a huge price premium over SATA SSDs, the massive performance increase is much more justifiable in terms of cost premium compared to say, the 960 Pro, which is for people who want the best. It will remain that way, until the 970 Pro and Evo come out, or perhaps until a 3D XPoint SSD comes out.
Third, I expect an enterprise version to come out too, with power loss protection. The only real issue i see is if there is something like the 840 Evo that caused performance drops, but so far Samsung's TLC drives since then have been solid.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I believe the 840 evo was planar NAND, whereas the newer designs are 3D NAND. That may be part of the reason.XabanakFanatik - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I see no mention of Samsung's silent delays of these drives. As of now most models of both the pro and evo are listed as ship by late December or January.Kind of disappointing you would gloss over a 2-3 month delay like that.
haukionkannel - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
It seems that Samsung was lucky that their 250GB unit did fail...http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-960-ev...
It seems to completely another series than 1Tb version.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
What are you trying to say here?Gigaplex - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I think they're trying to say the performance isn't great. Failing means we don't get to see the performance numbers.Dave Null - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
This is indeed frustrating. I was expecting the 960 Pro drives I preordered to arrive last week. Now Amazon is reporting January.Something major must have happened for Samsung to miss its release date so badly, but nobody is reporting it.
Flying Aardvark - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
I went with the 600P 1TB instead.. had it for 2 weeks now.. I love it. Being M.2 I didn't buy it for heavy workloads anyway so it won't throttle. But if I needed performance I'd go with the Intel 750 instead of what I got.Phattio - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
my 960 Pro 512GB arrives today. ordered from best buy online.Kristian Vättö - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
There is a simple explanation: NAND shortage.XabanakFanatik - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Of course! I'm glad you had an article about it. Oh, wait.I'm fairly certain that people need to know that despite your reviews coming out on time that they won't be able to buy the products for months.
zanon - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Interesting to see the rate at which these continue to progress, and I'm glad Samsung continues to ramp performance aggressively. One thing I wish you could find some way to integrate is at least a summary of reliability features like how a drive handles power loss, and (depending on feasibility if you are mainly testing short-term loaners) maybe some followup a few months down the line with longer term performance/reliability observations. While Samsung has long been at or near the pinnacle of out-of-box raw performance, they've also had a history of playing a bit fast and loose with reliability and support, and I think that deserves some sort of recognition. I have a lot of Intel 730s that replaced or were chosen over Samsung drives of the time after a number of poor experiences with the long term usage 840 series for example, and while the 840s were superior in many respects on paper and Day 1, by Day 100+ and under stress they developed issues that were not immediately apparent.Also, a small typo on the final page, looks like at least one of the $/GB (the 750@1TB) isn't right.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I am working on some longer-term data and performance retention testing, but the amount of extra equipment that requires means not many drives will get that treatment. Unexpected power loss testing might be more feasible, but for the near future the testbed is too busy for me to add something like this to the routine.The Intel 750 doesn't fit conveniently in the price comparison chart because of its unusual capacities. The prices listed are for the 400GB and 1.2TB models, and the 800GB model isn't listed in the table.
Bullwinkle J Moose - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Speaking of long-term data retention......If I had 2 SSD's, one unplugged and stored in a closet and one plugged in with power on but idle and unused, would the one plugged in retain data longer even though it is unused????
patrickjp93 - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Yes. There is wear leveling and data refresh in modern SSDs (840/Evo being the exception with cell band drift)ex_User - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Vaporware. 'Nuff said.Magichands8 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
This is magnificent! Not only has Samsung produced an SSD that under performs its own previous generation product but one that manages to do so while using even MORE power at an even HIGHER price per GB! They even put it on a form factor that makes the drive almost entirely irrelevant! The only thing missing is a feature that makes the modules randomly explode upon contact with the users computer.Dug - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
What are you talking about?BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
You have a unique perspective. :)Daggoth - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I have a question, isn't the z97 chipset capped at 2GB per second due to DMI 2.0? Isn't this a problem for the max sequential reads?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I test PCIe SSDs in the primary PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, because the riser card used for power measurement is a 16-lane low-profile card.Bullwinkle J Moose - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
The 960 Pro is much better price over the duration of WarrantyI can generally kill 1 out of 4 SSD's within the warranty period
so if I buy 4 960 Pro's and 4-960 EVO's, here is the breakdown @ 500GB
4-960 Pro's = $330 X 4 or $1320 divided by 5yr warranty = $264 per year for 5 years
or
4-960 EVO's = $250 X 4 or $1000 divided by 3 years = $333.33 per year for 3 years
per year cost under warranty is WAY better for the PRO!
3 year warranty with TLC just doesn't do it for me
Bullwinkle J Moose - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I would REALLY need to be trying to kill at least 1 out of 4 but I could prolly do itSo tell me more about the internal speed Billy.....
How many seconds does it take to copy and paste 100GB to and from the same 960EVO?
and from the 960PRO?
shabby - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Why wasn't the 256gb version tested? Tom reviewed it and it was kinda meh compared to the rest of the mlc drives, it was as bad as the 600p in some cases.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
The 250GB was tested. It died. See page 1 for details.ddriver - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
TOMs has tested it. As expected, it is marginally slower.Bensant - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Just received my 960 Pro today, installed and everything is working properly apart from the Samsung driver. Have spent the last 40mins trying to locate the NVME 2.0 driver to no avail. Would anyone have a link to it yet? Or is it still unavailable and coming with the new magician software at the end of the month?XabanakFanatik - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Yeah, you should be able to use the version 1.0 driver until they finally get around to releasing the new one with Magician 5.0.What capacity pro did you buy that you actually received this early? 512GB?
Bensant - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Idk that's a bit funny then, the original drivers (For the 950 pro) failed to detect my 960 pro for some reason. It's been installed and is booting as my OS drive too, just using the Microsoft driver!And yeah, was the 512GB that I ordered, couldn't exactly justify getting the higher capacities after just spending more then $4000 on a new triple monitor setup haha
jeffbui - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Benchmarks are great but where are the real world measurements? How will this affect me vs the other drives?jeffbui - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614Look at all the real world measurements: Game load times, application load times, multitasking performance,
Billy Tallis - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Kristian did a good job of explaining why we rely on playing back traces of real-world I/O rather than re-running the applications themselves: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8979/samsung-sm951-5...It has only gotten more impractical to build a valid and reproducible application benchmark suite, to the point that any such system would have to be cut off from the Internet to prevent automatic updates from changing the conditions of the test.
From the perspective of the SSD, our ATSB trace-based tests present a nearly identical workload to running the applications themselves, but with far better reproducibility. It might be possible to improve how we present the results of those three tests, but I do not believe that splitting those traces into a dozen different scenarios would make it any easier to come to a purchasing decision than by considering the measurements we currently report.
RaistlinZ - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
I'm currently using an 850 EVO on my ASUS X99 Pro motherboard. Will my mobo fully support the 960? Also, is it better to do a fresh Windows 10 install on an NVMe drive, or does cloning still work well?ghojezz - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
I don't understand, anandtech's using Z97 Deluxe for benchmark but it only supports 10Gbps M.2 Bandwidth, right? So theoretically, you didn't push 960 to its max performance. Anyone care to explain?Billy Tallis - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
The motherboard's built-in M.2 slot is not used, because it does not permit measuring power consumption. M.2 PCIe drives are connected through an adapter and riser card to the primary PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, which will continue to be sufficient until PCIe 4 SSDs and motherboards arrive.Eddie Goodie - Sunday, November 20, 2016 - link
It seems these drives are delayed because of NAND shortage. But what about the driver and the Magician software ? There is a lack or delay of some kind? If these items work and benefit former models, I see no reason for this delay after delay. Needless to say they play in my decission to buy a 960Pro when available, I'll wait for some advances here. Very dissapointing.hvar - Monday, November 21, 2016 - link
Where are the RAIDs? I want a RAID-5 enclosure with 5 of these drives with Thunderbolt 3 connector for video editing. Why does all RAID-enclosures still use SATA?Beany2013 - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
Because no bugger is making anything other than SATA/SAS RAID cards so far.I'm sure they'll come along, but they're taking their bloody time about it.
Chad - Saturday, December 3, 2016 - link
Dat Optics been making them for awhile now. Thunderbolt 1, 2 & 3 enclosures. I use one. It flies!Meteor2 - Wednesday, November 23, 2016 - link
Is there going to be an 860 line from Samsung, or is SATA maxed out?JJWV - Wednesday, November 30, 2016 - link
"As is normal for Samsung's EVO lines, the usable capacities are a bit smaller, with the 1TB EVO being 1000GB instead of 1024GB."It is norma for the whole world except Microsoft and some others : 1 TB is 1000 GB, just like 1TW is 1000 GW. (On the other hand 1 TiB is 1024 GiB notice the "i" between the T and the B ?)
haybat - Saturday, May 13, 2017 - link
so, this is MLC or TLC NAND drive? because all of samsung datasheet claimed that 960 Evo is using MLC NAND.