There are a number of issues that make the Samsung 960 Pro a bit particular. The first is its ridiculous pace. With a claimed sequential learn pace of as much as 3500MB/s and a sequential write pace as much as 2100MB/s, that is basically a Formula One automotive crammed inside a drive no greater than your index finger. It was additionally the primary NVMe SSD geared toward us regular, non-enterprise people to return in a 2TB capability, providing caverns of house in a pint-sized package deal.
For many, it’s one of many best SSDs ever made. The different factor that makes it stand out, nevertheless, is that it prices an absolute fortune, with the smallest 512GB mannequin beginning at £260 / $300, going all the best way as much as over £1000 / $1249 for that oh-so-special 2TB model. You might purchase your self a brand new graphics card with that sort of cash, and even a whole PC. Why, then, must you take into account getting this over its considerably cheaper 960 Evo sibling? Let’s discover out.
Much like Samsung’s 860 Pro, and the 850 Pro earlier than it, a big a part of the 960 Pro’s enchantment comes right down to endurance. NVMe SSDs are nonetheless a comparatively new-ish expertise in comparison with good previous SATA3, therefore why the 960 Evo solely comes with a three-year guarantee and affords an endurance score of 100-400 terabytes written (TBW). The 960 Pro, then again, ups that to 5 years and 400 TBW for the 512GB mannequin, 800 TBW for the 1TB model and 1200 TBW for the eye-watering 2TB version.
Also just like the Samsung 860 Pro, nevertheless, it’s unlikely that you simply, a daily PC gamer kind, will ever use the 960 Pro to that sort of extent. Indeed, even Samsung describe the 960 Pro as an SSD geared toward high-end workstations, so until you’re commonly transferring many a whole bunch of GBs each month, all of it begins to really feel like pointless overkill.
NVMe SSDs require an M.2 slot (above) in your motherboard, so that you’ll must be sure you’ve truly acquired one before you purchase
Indeed, when working my suite of artificial benchmarks, the 2TB 960 Pro I used to be despatched for assessment wasn’t truly any sooner than the 1TB 960 Evo. My check system shouldn’t have held it up, both, as this contains a three.6GHz Intel Core i5-8600Okay processor, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance 3000MHz RAM and an Asus Prime Z370-P motherboard.
In AS SSD’s 1GB sequential check, as an example, which reads and writes 1GB of knowledge to adjoining positions on an SSD’s storage, the 960 Pro scored simply 2392.85MB/s learn and 1909.95MB/s write. Now that’s nonetheless fairly phenomenal taken by itself (the SATA3-based 860 Pro, by comparability, got here in with 522.08MB/s learn and 489.82MB/s write), however as you possibly can see from the graph under, each of these scores are literally a fraction behind the 960 Evo – and that’s after a number of retests to verify it wasn’t a one-time anomaly both.
Even Samsung’s personal efficiency benchmark in its Magician software program device couldn’t reproduce the 960 Pro’s claimed speeds both, as right here its sequential learn end result reached simply 3062MB/s whereas its write pace truly got here in slower at 1819MB/s.
The 960 Pro pulled forward barely when it got here to smaller recordsdata, as AS SSD’s random 4K check (which reads and writes 1GB of small 4K chunks throughout an SSD’s storage) noticed it learn at 44.72MB/s and write at 141.43MB/s, but it surely’s hardly the sort of leap in efficiency you’d anticipate given the distinction in worth.
An analogous story performed out in CrystalDiskMark’s random 4K Eight-queue-Eight-thread check, which replicates the sort of workload you’d usually see on the sort of system the 960 Pro was designed for – servers and workstations. Here, the 960 Pro scored the next learn pace than the 960 Evo, coming in at 1701.6MB/s versus 1634.9MB/s, however its write pace of 1448.6MB/s was pipped to the publish by only a handful of MBs.
With outcomes like this, you’d need to be fairly determined for a 2TB NVMe SSD (and have a spare kidney to promote as a way to purchase it) to select this over the 960 Evo. It’s additionally value making an allowance for that, regardless of costing over a grand, you continue to don’t get a mounting screw included within the field. As I stated in my 960 Evo assessment, you don’t technically want one as it’s going to perform completely properly with out being secured to your motherboard, however at this type of worth I’d anticipate to have every little thing I would like, gold-plated, within the rattling field.
The 960 Pro could be the all-singing-all-dancing SSD in most individuals’s books, however these persons are in all probability additionally stark-raving lunatics. If you’re excited about going NVMe and have the motherboard to assist it, do the sane factor and get the 960 Evo as a substitute. You’ll thank your self later.
