Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2

Forget exploding smartphones and overpriced TVs, there’s an area where the Samsung brand means best-in-class: storage. The South Korean giant is back with the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2 SSD, a drive that it promises delivers ‘next generation professional performance and endurance'. 

We got our hands on the version with a whopping 2TB of storage, which means not only does this drive provide incredibly fast speeds, but it also comes with enough space for plenty of applications, files and games – if you’re that way inclined.

Of course, the combination of the latest technology, high speeds, massive capacity and the Samsung brand should set a few alarm bells ringing when it comes to anticipating the price. This is not a budget drive at all, in fact at $1299.99 (around £1065, AU$1710) for the 2TB version, this is an SSD that costs more than most PCs of laptops. It also comes in 512GB and 1TB capacities, and while they are cheaper ($329.99 and $629.99 respectively), these are still pricey drives that are aimed squarely at professionals and enthusiasts. So is the high price worth it? Read on to find out.

 Features and specification

The Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2 is unlike regular SSDs which use the SATA III port on your motherboard – instead it uses the M.2 port, which most modern motherboards in desktop PCs and laptops have. This allows it to avoid the bottleneck of the ageing SATA connection, which was mainly designed with traditional mechanical hard drives in mind. 

While most regular SSDs top out at around 520MB/s write, 560MB/s read speeds, the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2 is capable of a fantastic 2,100MB/s write 3,500MB/s read speeds, according to Samsung. That is a huge speed boost, and one that if you have the money to afford the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2, will really make an impact on your day-to-day computing.

Samsung is able to cram this much performance, as well as a huge amount of drive space, into such a small stick thanks to its 48-layer V-NAND-based architecture.

This is a drive that’s also built to last, with the 1TB model of the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2 having a guaranteed lifespan of at least 800TB, while the 2TB is even longer at 1.2PB (which is 1200TB). It has a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 1.5 million hours, while a warranty of 5 years also backs up the drive. Power consumption is low at around 5.8 watts when idle.

Trim and S.M.A.R.T support are included, as well as AES 256-bit encryption. Basically, this hard drive claims to be pretty much everything you wished for in a hard drive, but does it live up to the hype?

 Performance

So does the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2 live up to the hype and justify the performance? Yes. In our ATTO benchmark scores, the hard drive scored an incredible 2074.863MB/s write, 3421.242MB/s read. This is one seriously fast SSD.

The Chrystal Disk Benchmark also produced fantastic results, with 3480MB/s read, 2100MB/s write. With this drive we can begin talking about GB/s speeds, rather than MB/s. 

To put this in perspective, the Adata SSD Ultimate SU800 managed 562MB/s read and 515MB/s write. We were impressed with those scores, but in light of the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2's performance, even that seems a little slow. Of course there are a few things to bear in mind here: first, the Adata SSD Ultimate SU800 still uses the SATA III connection, so its performance is bottlenecked. Secondly, its also a heck of a lot cheaper than the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2.

In our real world tests we copied over a 3.5GB file in just 38 seconds. If your job requires you to move large amounts of data around, then the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2 is definitely worth considering, and can justify its price tag in the long run.

There’s no two ways about this: the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2 is an absolutely phenomenal hard drive, with performance, capacity and reliability that will make any other SSD’s performance look pretty disappointing. 

Unshackled from the bottleneck that is SATA, the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2 shows the potential of solid state storage… but it won’t be for everyone.

We liked

Where do we start? The 2TB capacity is great, the reliability gives us confidence and the compact size of the M.2 compatible drive means this is an easy upgrade that you simply slot into your motherboard.

Of course, the biggest thing we liked about this drive is its speed. We’ve never tested such a fast hard drive.

We didn't like

Speed, top of the range technology and a huge capacity comes at a price… and what a price. 

Over a grand for the 2TB version means that this drive is only for enthusiasts and professionals. The rest of us can only sit by and dream of those kinds of speeds. For now at least.

Final verdict

Thought your SSD was fast? Think again, as the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2 will likely blow it out of the water. This is an incredible feat of engineering which has brought us quite possibly the fastest consumer hard drive in the world.

If you have a workstation that needs to move large files almost instantly, then this is the drive for you. Other users may not quite get the benefit of this drive considering the price, though if you install Windows 10 on it, you’ll find the OS boots up much faster. But that alone doesn’t justify the price.

So while this is one of the best hard drives we’ve ever tested, we cannot recommend it to everyone. Instead, we urge you to seriously consider your budget and what you need from an SSD.

If those needs mean you have to invest in the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro M.2, then we promise you won’t be disappointed.