Samsung 960 Pro 1TB review: the fastest consumer SSD in history

How can they adapt to many gigamabytes - essentially equivalent to all data - into something so small? Hard to believe that Samsung are able to squeeze a 1 TB total storage in their small 960 Pro SSD. And this is not even the largest capacity of its PCIe-based NVMe units. Sigh. ace of the future, is not it?

The 960 Pro is the continuation of SSD NVMe focused on consumer first Samsung to hit our PC and, together with the Intel SSD 750, wrote the rulebook on how the next generation of solid-state storage would take place. This new unit of Samsung, although it is writing a new chapter by itself.

Looking to avoid exposure? Use the quick links below to pass performance tests and adjust all important final accounts.

Samsung 960 Pro 1TB specifications

Arguably the most important part of the spec sheet of Samsung 960 Pro is the fact that it is running with the protocol expresses non-volatile media (NVMe).

NVMe was the first storage protocol to be written from scratch to meet increased solid state storage and PCIe interface. Before we arrived we were anchored to the old school SATA AHCI interface and protocol - both designed for mechanical turntables traditional hard drives.

That was fine in the primordial soup from which units nascent solid state, where performance degraded if so much as looked at his expensive SSD 64GB and strove above 100 MB / s crawled, but the burgeoning market melted quickly developed into one of the most rapidly evolving rapidly iterating parts of the technology industry and successive generations of SSD have been hitting my head against the limits of 600 MB / s of performance SATA 6Gbps interface.

But even when switched to SSD PCIe interface higher bandwidth they found the AHCI protocol meant that they were using were still limited in their performance. This protocol was invented for high latency turntables with a series of commands to run through before something happened on the disc. SSDs still have to slog through all these legacy commands, wasting valuable CPU resources to get anything done. NVMe but was introduced to cut through debris and give the SSD the freedom to do what is good - to get to their data quickly.

                                 Samsung 960 Pro 1TB specs

	Samsung 960 Pro	Intel SSD 750	Samsung 950 Pro	Samsung 850 Pro
Interface	M.2 PCIe	PCIe	M.2 PCIe	SATA
Protocol	NVMe	NVMe	NVMe	AHCI
Capacity	1TB	1.2TB	512GB	512GB
Controller	Samsung Polaris	Intel NVMe	Samsung UBX	Samsung MEX
Memory	Samsung 256Gb MLC	Intel 128Gb MLC	Samsung 128Gb MLC	Samsung 86Gb MLC
Rated read speed	3,500 MB/s	2,400 MB/s	2,500 MB/s	550 MB/s
Rated write speed	2,100 MB/s	1,200 MB/s	1,500 MB/s	520 MB/s
Price	$629 (£629)	$790 (£715)	$316 (£293)	$210 (£163)

The next most important part of the equation is the memory controller. It is this which manages all memory silicon sitting on the PCB SSD and, as usual Samsung, who have used once again its own controller with the familiar title Polaris. It is this driver giving Polaris 960 Pro read their maximum write speeds of 3,500MB / s and 2,100MB / s, respectively. Although inevitably you will not quite see those speeds in the real world.

As one of the flash memory manufacturers largest in the world is no surprise to see Samsung using its own advanced to compensate for the 1TB capacity of this unit V-NAND. Due to the nature of 3D stacked memory which is very densely populated, and the fact that they are using only compounds 256GB modules. There are only four memory packages small PCB. That's pretty impressive.

Samsung has expanded its range of SSD 960 Pro so now spans the top of this range of 512GB, 1TB and 2TB, with the lower EVO specifications drives the sports capacities of 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB, respectively.

Samsung 960 Pro benchmarks 1TB