Posted on 09/21/2016 9:41:25 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Samsung unleashes 960 Pro and 960 Evo SSDs with ridiculous write speeds
by Michael Passingham
Samsung has launched the highest-capacity consumer M.2 SSD around, revealing the 2TB 960 PRO at an event in Seoul this morning. Not only that, the firm has also managed to improve top speeds by 40%.
The top-of-the-range 960 PRO has claimed peak sequential read speeds of 3,500MB/s (megabytes per second) and write speeds of 2,100MB/s. This is up from 2,500MB/s and 1,500MB/s respectively in the previous generation launched a year ago. The 960 PRO will be available in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities.
Squeezing 2TB of storage onto an M.2 SSD is no mean feat, and Samsung has had to save space to make room. Where normally, the SSD's controller chip would sit next to the DRAM module, in the case of the 960 PRO, the two have been stacked on top of one another to make room for the extra modules.
Pricing starts from $329 for the 512GB version, which translates to £304 inc VAT. For comparison, the previous-generation 950 PRO now costs around £300, where its RRP at launch was around £326 in 2015 money.
(Excerpt) Read more at trustedreviews.com ...
Yowza! 2 TB and 3.5 GB/s reads? That’s scary! That’s some serious performance there, I’m real curious to see how Samsung pulled that kind of performance out of the system...
Sweet!
Just so long as it doesn’t have a battery....
KYPD
I put last years 850 in my Dell last year and it is a monster. The performance improvement from my Old SSD was easily noticeable. The only trick is to give it the bandwidth it needs. I had to add a card so it could use the number of channels it needed.
To get your moneys worth you need to check your system specs very carefully.
It probably won’t work on an Apple.
That’s a full-length Bluray movie every second or 2
Sadly, these will be made obsolete because the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint technology could make it possible to combine RAM and non-volatile storage on the same chip—it could completely revolutionize computer design itself.
Hook some up to Hillary to see if she can move a little better/faster.
Samsung is following up its NVMe successes from 2015 with some fresh blazing-fast M.2 SSDs for storage geeks. The company just announced the Samsung 960 Pro and 960 Evo during this year’s Samsung SSD Global Summit.
As with 2015’s 950 Pro NVMe SSDs, the new 960 series marries stacked V-NAND density with the Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) specification. They also use a 4-lane PCIe 3.0 interface, just like the 950 Pro.
The 960 Evo and Pro will roll out in October with prices starting at $130 and $330, respectively. The 960 Evo will be available in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities, while the Pro offers 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB versions. The Evo utilizes cheaper and more tightly packed TLC (triple-level cell) NAND, while the Pro sports speedier MLC (multi-level cell) NAND.
That 2TB maximum is double the top capacity Samsung offered with the 950 Pro in 2015, and in another age would’ve earned the moniker “jaw dropping” for packing that much storage into an M.2 SSD. But this is the age of the 1TB SDXC card, so maybe sheer capacity increases aren’t as impressive as they used to be. Seagate also announced a 2TB M.2 storage option for enterprises in July.
The 960 Pro offers a nice bump in sequential read/write speeds compared to the 950 Pro. The 960 Pro will have a read speed of 3.5GB/s and a sequential write speed of 2.1GB/s. The 950 Pro, by comparison, topped out its read speed at 2.5GB/s and a write speed of 1.5GB/s.
Samsung's promising a sequential read speed of 3.2GB/s and a write speed of 1.9GB/s for the 960 Evo. The 960 Evo will also be the first SSD to come with Samsung Intelligent TurboWrite technology, which the company says helps accelerate sequential read/writes.
The 960 Pro comes with a five-year limited warranty or up to 1.2 petabytes written, whichever comes first. The 960 Evo has a three-year warranty or up to 400 terabytes written for the 1TB version. It’s not clear what the guarantees are on the lower capacity 960 Evo models.
The impact on you at home: The 960 Pro and 960 Evo “storage sticks” are definitely impressive, as was the 950 Pro that rolled out last year. But unless you have intense storage performance demands, most people will be suitably impressed by going with a standard hard-drive replacement SSD that uses a SATA interface. SSD prices are dropping all the time and SATA-based SSDs are still noticeably zippy compared to a pokey spinning hard drive. One of our favorites is Samsung's own 850 Evo ($157.30 for 500GB on Amazon) which offers great performance and capacity at a reasonable price.
Prices seem to be much cheaper here, from what is listed on your post. BTW, SSD stands for Solid State Drive, for those wondering.
One step closer to Skynet.
Yowza! 2 TB and 3.5 GB/s reads? That’s scary!
...
Do we really need DRAM anymore?
I need to hang a spare one beside the extra tp roll in my bathroom.
(Server Humor)
An excellent question. I'm running an ultrabook with only 4 GB of RAM very adequately. The thing smokes.
So, on my desktop my new 500 GB SSD is nearly 20% full. Time to upgrade! (Why do I do this?) ;-)
“make it possible to combine RAM and non-volatile storage on the same chip—it could completely revolutionize computer design itself.”:
I could see this technology being a game changer in the data center. You can access DRAM/SRAM a heck of a lot faster than flash memory @ the cell level.
However, RAM is pretty abundant on the desktop these days ... while there would be a substantial performance increase, I don’t think users at home would benefit from that technology in the near term. However, down the road in the “distant” future (i.e. 3 - 5 years :-) ), I’m sure things like gaming rigs, home video editors, and the like will load up their workstations with those hybrid RAM/flash disks :-).
It’s been incredible watching the “home” data storage industry evolve from frigging cassettes to SSDs. I hope I’m around another 40+ years to see what’s next :-). Crystal based storage is something I’ve been hoping to see come around (basically use lasers to shift atomic structures in crystals to represent 1s and 0s ... while the idea has been tested in labs all over the world, it suffers from slow access times due to laser positioning ... however, there are ways around that :-) ... the late 70s Superman movie *proves* it can work ... and replicate itself too :-P :-) ).
“Do we really need DRAM anymore?”
In a nutshell, yes :-). Writing a flash cell causes a *tiny* amount of damage to the storage element. This damage accumulates over time and renders the cell useless. Don’t worry though, it takes millions and millions of writes to damage the cell permanently. Moreover, engineers of these disks employ algorithms called “write leveling” which helps distribute writes to redundant storage elements to help distribute wear and tear. The end result is a disk with a life as long or better than the best traditional, electromechanical hard disks out there.
If you were to use the flash cell as your primary memory in your system (outside of the cache memory on the CPU), you’d hit these cells quite frequently ... the end result would be a permanently damaged memory in relatively little time.
DRAM is going to be one of those elements in a computer that’s comparable to hydrogen :-). I suspect both DRAM and Ethernet will be around in some form for a long, long time :-). Both scale relatively well, are dirt cheap, and do what they do very well :-).
However, a very good professor friend of mine always warned me that one “stupid” research paper can make definitive claims such as the one I just made look absolutely ridiculous as early as tomorrow :-).
Sadly, these will be made obsolete because the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint technology could make it possible to combine RAM and non-volatile storage on the same chip—it could completely revolutionize computer design itself.
The reality is the tech used as SSD’s could act as system Ram..but the fastest will be the most costly the will be the system Ram and use sparingly.. and the next speed and cost level down will be your larger storage
That cost speed balancing act will always favor having two.. fastest costliest system ram and and less costly more plentiful storage space
I have an 840 Pro: 256G with a SATA interface.
It made a relatively slow system blinding fast, by comparison. When I moved it to a new, modern motherboard it really started to scream.
I used to recommend more RAM to breathe new life into an old system. Now, I suggest an SSD as well.
What I worry about is losing my data in a blink of an eye.
How reliable are these SSD’s compared to mechanical hard drives?
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