Gadgetory

hey guys welcome back to harbor unboxed if you missed it last month I checked out samsung's new 960 pro 1 terabyte SSD now this was a very very fast and through this great SSD that blew the competition away with ease the only catch well other than the enthusiast grade price if you will is availability still a month later you can't actually buy the 960 pro and major online retailers such as Newegg suggesting that it won't be available till January or maybe even February of 2017 so that's really disappointing pricing starts at 330 us or 430 ozzie and that's for the 512 gigabyte model and I have to say pricing does climb quite rapidly from there still the 960 pro series is certainly worth the asking price but these extreme performance SSDs really are overkill for most users so it can be hard to justify spending that much fully aware of this Samsung is offering a slightly cheaper alternative it still offers pretty much the same features and extreme performance the Evo series has been updated and now the 960 Evo is able to slay pretty much every Satur SSD on the market as well as a good number of PCI Express SSDs as well like the 960 pro series the new 960 Evo models take advantage of the nvme protocol and as such utilize the PCIe interface all models are built on the m2 2280 form factor and use Samsung's 48 layer v-nand Samsung's latest generation SLC caching technology branded intelligent turbo right is also being used here they've also improved thermal controls so you can write data longer without overheating the drives also boast the larger buffer so you can write larger chunks of data at full speed all of these technologies and features come together very well for the 960 pro series so we're expecting to find much the same again so then what's the difference what makes the 960 Evo series more affordable the key difference being the type of NAND flash memory being used the pro series uses mlc v-nand whereas the Evo series has been equipped with TL CV and the claimed impact on performance is very minor sequential read speeds in bend down greater from 3.5 gigabytes per second to 3.2 year bytes per second while the write throughput drops from 2.1 gigabytes per second to 1.9 gigabytes per second this kind of reduction in performance isn't something most users are going to notice in fact I'm willing to bet almost no one could notice the difference the real impact of using TLC memory opposed to mlc comes down to reliability when compared to mlc or multi-level cell which stores two bits per cell TLC three level cell stores three bits per cell as the name suggests this improves density or capacity but in doing so reduces performance and most crucially endurance as such the insurance rating takes a huge hit here whereas the 960 pro 512 gigabyte model is good for 400 terabytes of written data the 500 gigabyte Evo drive is only rated for 200 terabytes Samsung is offering the 960 Evo series with a 3-year warranty which means in order to reach the 200 terabytes of written data within that period users would have to be writing as much as 128 gigabytes of data to their SSD per day that is an insane amount of data essentially you'd be filling the entire drive every few days at that rate in my opinion it would be unrealistic to even suggest that the typical user would write that much data in an average week so really for the majority of users is irrelevant whether an SSD is rated for 200 or 400 terabytes of written data as even 200 terabytes of writes is going to take a significantly long time to achieve for most obviously more is better for reliability but unless you're running an enterprise data warehouse or something of that nature then you're probably okay moving on the SSD 960 Evo comes in three capacities the smallest of which is the 250 gigabyte model the 250 gigabyte Drive is been priced at 129 dollars u.s. or roughly 170 ozzie the 500 gigabyte model that we have costs 249 us which works out to be about 330 ozzie and the one terabyte model which will set you back 479 us or 565 aussie samsung claims that a typical load the one terabyte drive will consume 5.7 watts 5.41 for the 500 gigabyte model and 5.3 watts for the 250 gigabyte model those are similar ratings for the 960 pro series all three versions of the 960 Evo measure just 80 millimeters long just as we saw with the 960 pro series and again this means they adhere to the m2 2280 form factor the drives way between eight point three and nine grams with the one terabyte variant being the heaviest all three models boast the same 3.2 gigabytes per second read speed though the write performance does vary the 250 gigabyte model for example has a write speed of 1.5 gigabytes per second the 500 gigabyte model that we're looking at is rated to 1.8 gigabytes per second and the largest 1 terabyte model is said to be good for 1.9 gigabytes per second finally the 960 Evo series provides all the same data encryption features as all other Samsung SATA SSDs kick-starting the benchmarks let's take a quick look at the sequential read and write performance using the AS SSD benchmark here we see that the 960 Evo isn't a great deal slower 960 pro when sequentially reading and writing data the Evo reach just over 2 point 6 gigabytes per second for the read test and 1 point 6 gigabytes per second for the write test making it incredibly fast moving to the 4k 64 thread test we find that yet again the 960 Evo isn't a great deal slower than a 960 Pro model it is worth noting here that the Evo write performance is considerably greater than that of intel's SSD 750 series the access time results are surprising as the 960 Evo was slightly quicker than the pro series here the results are certainly within the margin of error but it suggests that the read and write access time of the Evo series is comparable to the pro this also made the 960 Evo much faster than pretty much every other SSD tested this is the type of scenario where that massive read and write bandwidth comes in very handy extracting a large 38 gigabyte file archive on the 960 Evo took just under a minute thanks to a rather snappy throughput of 660 megabytes per second this meant that the Evo wasn't a great deal slower than last year's 950 Pro though it was through 2 percent slower than the 960 pro the 960 Evo was also very snappy in our game and program copy tests here it only came second to the 9 6 Pro while it was a good bit faster than Intel's SSD 750 series the Evo drive sustained 856 megabytes per second for the game copy test and 512 megabytes per second for the program copy test now let's see how all that extra bandwidth might benefit general use case scenarios first up we have the classic boot test this one is pretty simple we measured the time it took for the system to load starting the test is the Windows 10 logo appears we then stopped the clock the moment the desktop loaded this took Samsung's 960 Evo just 6 seconds an impressive time indeed that said the crucial MX 300 wasn't far behind taking just 9 seconds meanwhile for those wondering a mechanical hard drive such as Western Digital z' read pro 4 terabyte hard drive kept us waiting quite a bit longer at 36 seconds to measure game load times we used call of duty infinite warfare and we measured the time it took to first load the game and then continue the single-player campaign mission we've cut out the splash screens and any input delay from us so all you have here is pure load times essentially if there were no splash screens this is how long it would take you to get into the game and start playing in the case of the 960 Evo that was just 11 seconds very impressive stuff again the MX 300 takes a little over twice that time at 25 seconds still there's a huge improvement over the WD red pro hard drive which took a little over twice as long again at 53 seconds price at $250 u.s. or 330 ozzie this 500 gigabyte SSD provides exceptional value given the performance that said for general users who just want to play games or rather than general users I should say gamers who want to play games or general users who just want to surf the net do emails and even office type applications like Word Excel all that kind of stuff then the 960 Evo really is overkill for well under half the price you're going to get the same sort of experience out of something like crucial x' MX 300 for that reason the 960 Evo finds itself in a bit of an awkward position it's roughly 24 percent cheaper than the equivalent 960 Pro Drive and while that's a decent discount it's probably still not enough as I said mainstream users will be served just as well by something like crucial zem X 300 or any other affordable sada TLC based SSD and at a cost of just 20 cents per gigabyte they are significantly cheaper the performance you get from these new nvme SSDs can really only be taken advantage of by professionals or extreme users if you will these users aren't going to be interested in saving a little bit of money on a slightly slower bottle using Telsey memory or at least I don't think they would be basically Samsung is hoping to entice consumers into splurging on the 960 series with the slightly more affordable Evo SSDs which as we have just seen still promised big bandwidths if you are able to take advantage of all that extra bandwidth in the 960 Evo series really is good value sadly though for most it will be a case of spending something like a hundred and fifty percent more per gigabyte for no noticeable performance increase over TLC based solder drives and well that's my honest opinion what samsung's new 960 evo does do is make intel's SSD 750 series and toshiba 0 CZ Rd 400 a series completely irrelevant for consumers seeking maximum performance the choice is very plainly either the 960 Evo or the 960 Pro personally though I think I would dig a little deeper and get the 960 Pro for that extended warranty and greater endurance rating with that I'm going to leave it there and let you guys take to the comments section I'm your host Steve see you next time