After the great success of Samsung’s 950 PRO, the announcement of its successor, the 960 PRO, had our attention immediately. The 950 PRO is arguably one of the most popular M.2 NVMe-based SSDs for avid system builders and is the go-to drive for those with a thirst for speedy transfer rates.
The ingredients for success are certainly present with the 960 PRO. This drive uses Samsung’s 3rd Generation of V-NAND and takes advantage of the new Polaris controller. Our first initial set of benchmark runs with the single 960 PRO revealed some extremely poor performance which mostly affected the write tests. After speaking with Samsung we were advised to modify the policy settings in Windows 10 to force Windows to turn off write-cache buffer flushing otherwise known as FUA. This resolved the issues we were having but customers may not be aware of this anomaly and should not be expected to modify such settings to allow the drive to perform at its optimum. We therefore urge Samsung to release their NVMe driver to alleviate this issue before the 960 PRO hits shelves.
As demonstrated on the preceding pages the performance of 960 PRO as a single drive is nothing of spectacular, allows us to achieve brilliant read/write transfer rates and IOPS.
Thankfully, a RAID0 configuration relies on the Intel RST driver and isn’t dependent on any NVMe driver. Combining two of these 960 PROs in RAID0 provides us with some outstanding results – delivering even better performance than the trusty 950 PRO in RAID0. So, if you do have a motherboard which supports dual-M.2s or if you plan to use a PCI Express adapter with M.2 and are on a pursuit to blistering transfer rates and IOPS then you can’t go far wrong with this option.
Samsung’s 960 PRO will be available to buy in November and will be priced as follows: £320 GBP / 512GB: $329 USD for the 512GB model. So this drive joins the market at a fairly reasonable price – there are cheaper NVMe options out there but none that boast such a skillset. Plus of course this drive carries with it a limited 5-year warranty.
The 960 PRO builds on the success of its predecessor. Those with a thirst for supreme storage bandwidth will be pleased to know that phenomenal results can be had by using RAID0.
Interested in finding out how to configure the 960 PROs in RAID0 as a bootable drive? Watch our video below!
VIDEO GUIDE – VORTEZ TV
Pros
+ Excellent read transfer rates
+ RAID0 yields outstanding results
+ Stylish design
+ Compact form factor
+ Uses 3rd Gen V-NAND
+ TRIM Support
+ Dynamic Thermal Guard
+ 5 Years Warranty
Cons
- Good case airflow is needed
- Still waiting on an NVMe driver
- Modification to SSD policy required for optimum performance
+ Excellent read transfer rates
+ RAID0 yields outstanding results
+ Stylish design
+ Compact form factor
+ Uses 3rd Gen V-NAND
+ TRIM Support
+ Dynamic Thermal Guard
+ 5 Years Warranty
Cons
- Good case airflow is needed
- Still waiting on an NVMe driver
- Modification to SSD policy required for optimum performance
Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.
