We liked what we saw when we tested Samsung's SSD 960 Pro nearly a month ago, however availability for the company's new flagship M.2 NVMe SSD has been spotty at best. It's been a rather long wait for enthusiasts and while it should be possible to lodge a 960 Pro, the drive is currently out of stock in all capacities on Newegg and strangely the 1TB variant isn't expected to show until Jan 2.

The 960 Pro'due south class-leading Yard.two NVMe performance, excellent endurance ratings, and v-yr warranty positioned it as the fastest consumer-grade SSD power users could hope to go their easily on. The only drawback to Samsung's new series then far appears to exist the price and while not outrageous by whatever ways, a toll of $0.64/GB for the cheapest model is still expensive.

Remedying this concern, Samsung has unleashed its more affordable 960 Evo series, which is also made in a smaller 250GB capacity. The crazy thing hither is that the 250GB model costs $130, taking the cost per gigabyte for this series downwards to ~$0.l. That's withal pretty pricey compared to TLC SATA drives such every bit the Crucial MX300, just nosotros also expect the 960 Evo to have a operation reward.

Like the 960 Pro, the 960 Evo is powered by Samsung'south Polaris controller coupled with Samsung's 48-layer V-NAND. Although the 960 Evo has been outfitted with TLC retention instead of MLC, the claimed impact on performance is minor with sequential read speeds dropping from three.5GB/s to iii.2GB/south and write throughput going from 2.1GB/due south to 1.9GB/due south.

In other words, you'd be paying over 20% less for the 960 Evo than the Pro and withal the impact on functioning could be considerably less than that. The new Evo series should also compare strongly against Crucial's TLC-based MX300, which claims sequential read speeds of 530MB/southward and write speeds of 510MB/s. With that, nosotros're keen to run into what Samsung's TLC NVMe SSD brings to the table.

Watch our video review of the 960 Evo or read on for the full written review...

The King of the TLC Loma

As merely mentioned, the 960 Evo series really isn't that different from the Pro serial we looked at last month. The only real change being the use of TLC NAND wink, rather than the costlier MLC NAND.

The employ of TLC memory brings iii primal differences for the Evo serial: probably to the lowest degree apropos is the reduced endurance rating, though the slightly lower functioning isn't that worrying either, whereas the cost savings will likely be of interest to many of you lot.

Compared to MLC which stores two $.25 per cell, TLC stores iii bits per prison cell to improve density (capacity), but in doing so reduces performance and most crucially endurance. The 960 Pro 512GB model for example sports an endurance rating of 400 terabytes written and that figure has been halved for the 500GB Evo model. Equally such, the warranty menstruation offered past Samsung has been reduced from 5 years to three.

Putting 200TB worth of writes into perspective, over a 3-year warranty menses you would have to exist writing 182GB per twenty-four hours to accomplish the advertised limit of safe writes. That'due south an insane amount of data and you'd be filling the entire drive every few days at that rate. In my opinion, it would be unrealistic to suggest that typical users would write so much data in an average week.

I installed a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB SSD in my main piece of work PC most half dozen months agone and in that time I have written just i.4TB of data. Near of the heavy lifting is done by my NAS, simply this still isn't a depression figure and it means I've written just under 8GB of data per twenty-four hour period on average. From what I've seen, power users working exclusively from their SSD struggle to reach 50GB per day, and then 182GB per 24-hour interval should exist extreme overkill unless you are running an enterprise information warehouse or something of that nature.

Moving on, the 960 Evo comes in three capacities: the smallest 250GB model is priced at $129 or $0.51/GB, the 500GB model that we have costs $249 which works out to be $0.49/GB, and the 1TB model will gear up y'all back $479 or $0.47/GB.

Samsung claims that under typical load the 1TB drive will eat 5.7 watts, 5.4 watts for the 500GB model and 5.3 watts for the 250GB model. Those are similar ratings to the 960 Pro series.

All 3 versions of the 960 Evo measure only 80mm long just as we saw with the 960 Pro series, meaning they adhere to the Thou.ii (2280) form cistron. The drives counterbalance betwixt 8.3 and 9.0 grams with the 1TB version naturally existence the heaviest. All 3 models avowal the same 3.2GB/due south read speed though the write performance varies. The 250GB model is rated at 1.5GB/southward, the 500GB model at 1.8GB/southward and the 1TB model at 1.9GB/south.

As expected, the drives too vary when looking at input/output operations per 2d. The 250GB model is good for 333,000 IOPS read and 300,000 IOPS. The 500GB model is rated at 330,000 IOPS read and write while the 1TB model is said to be capable of 380,000 IOPS read and 360,000 write.

The 960 Evo series provides the same data encryption features equally all other Samsung SATA SSDs. Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) security technology volition aid keep information rubber at all times. Information technology includes an AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption engine to ensure that your personal files remain secure. Being hardware-based, the encryption engine secures your data without performance deposition that you lot may experience with a software-based encryption. Information technology's also compliant with avant-garde security management solutions (TCG Opal).

New Software All Round

Samsung has finally made its NVMe 2.0 driver set up. Neither the 960 Pro or 960 Evo series have been publicly available of course, but reviewers testing the 960 Pro required a pocket-sized operating system modification to disabled a control called Strength Unit Access (FUA).

Samsung says this command is a conservative arroyo taken by Microsoft to ensure information integrity in instance of sudden power loss. From Windows 8 onwards, Microsoft already incorporated an automatic FLUSH command (for NTFS file formats) to ensure data integrity, but it simultaneously maintained the much older FUA command activated in the standard drive settings.

This redundancy ways that write speeds are significantly inhibited due to unnecessary write verification processes. By manually disabling the FUA command, the write functioning reached the expected levels. However, every bit Samsung points out manipulating bulldoze properties is not very user-friendly, so the new Samsung NVMe Driver ii.0 does this automatically while also ensuring basic system compatibility. For instance, this commuter makes it possible to utilize the 960 Evo series with Windows 7.

We'll exist testing the 960 Evo 500GB drive with the Samsung NVMe 2.0 commuter and we will also be re-testing the 960 Pro to update results where need exist.

Samsung has besides announced that there volition be a new and improved version of the Magician software, though sadly information technology won't be available until the end of Nov. What we practise know, or have at least been told, is that this will be a complete re-design of the Magician software.

Samsung says it will offer consumers an piece of cake mode to manage their SSD cheers to a host of new convenient features and a more intuitive user interface that offers an overview of disquisitional drive data and handles firmware/commuter updates.