When I was testing Samsung’s new 960 Pro M.2/NVMe SSD, a coworker looking over my shoulder at the results declared, “That’s sick!” High praise in today’s parlance, and a direct response to this drive’s incredible speed. It’s a phrase I continued to voice silently as I saw read and write numbers of 2.7GBps and 1.7GBps, respectively, pop up. And that was from the super-conservative AS SSD benchmark with non-compressible data; CrystalDiskMark 5 boasted reads and writes of 3.5GBps and 2.17GBps, respectively, with a 2GB data set. Whoa.
[h=Price and capacity]2[/h]At the time of this writing, the 960 Pro is priced around 63 to 72 cents per gigabyte on Amazon: $372 for the 512GB version, $630 for the 1TB model, and $1,299 for the 2TB version. That’s right, there’s a 2TB model thanks to the Samsung 3D/stacked-layer NAND employed on the drives. If you’ve been holding off on M.2/NVMe because of the relatively low capacity (1TB isn’t enough?) then the 960 Pro should eliminate that argument, if not the cost issue.
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