Gadgetory

hey guys steve here and welcome to another hardware unboxed video today Matt isn't with us he's a little busy with a few other things so I've stepped in or rather sat down to take care of Samsung's latest and greatest SSD speaking of which do you find that today's PCI Express SSDs are just a tad too slow well of course you do what am I saying sequential read speeds of up to 2.5 gigabytes per second right speed through even less come on guys this is 2016 thankfully someone has stood up and address this bandwidth crisis our Savior once again is Samsung forget about those lousy 2.5 gigabytes per second read speeds if you aren't pushing over three gigs you might as well have a hard drive okay so I'm being a tad overdramatic here still it's hard not to take the mickey when you see consumer grade storage device is capable of 3.5 gigabytes per second for the reads coupled with 2.1 gigabytes per second write speeds that's right these are the advertised sequential read and write speeds for samsung's new 960 pro series replacing the now year old 950 Pro Series enthuses can look forward to much faster much larger m2 drives from Samsung this new series is powered by the Samsung Polaris controller which other than the codename has no relationship with AMD's Polaris graphics architecture when compared to the 950 pro's ubx controller which featured three cores Polaris has been beefed up to pack five cause one of the five cores has been dedicated to host communication while the other four cores are use of flash management coupled with this new controller is Samsung's latest third generation of V NAND flash technology also known as 3d NAND it dramatically increases the number of layers present in each chip by stacking them vertically thus increasing capacity without having to reduce the size of the fabrication process the 950 series use 32 layered nan while the 960 has been bumped up to 48 layers enabling Samsung offer the spacious 2 terabyte version with real estate at a premium here Samsung has employed an advanced packaging technology known as package on package by stacking the DRAM cache on top of the controller Samsung has freed up value PCB space for for NAND flash chips however packaging these densely together can cause other issues one such issue faced by the 950 Pro Series for example was heat and heavy load the 950 Pro Series did run a little hot forcing the controller to scale back which ultimately reduced performance in the case of the new 960 pro series samsung has taken several measures to reduce the regularity of thermal throttling one such step was to include a small copper film heat spreader which is estimated by Samsung to improve thermal performance by around 30% also helping to address this issue is improved power efficiency this is probably the biggest factor at play here these things combined should see the 960 pro last around 50% longer under load before throttling can be seen lasting 50% longer is one thing it is also worth noting that in this time the 960 pro is able to transfer almost twice as much data so the chances of throttling are greatly diminished samsung claims under typical load the two terabyte drive will consume 5.8 watts 5.3 watts for the one terabyte model and 5.1 watts for the 512 gigabyte model those are similar ratings for the 950 pro series though of course we are talking about a much faster drive here so fair to say efficiency has been improved for data security hardware based aes 256-bit data encryption is supported along with TCG opal while other features such as trim garbage collection and smart are also supported lastly I should just note that the 960 Pro Series comes with the same five-year warranty as the 950 pro series also the endurance rating for the two turbo model has been set at a massive 1,200 terabytes of written data eight hundred terabytes have written data for the one terabyte version and four hundred terabytes of written data for the pokey little 512 gigabyte model okay that all sounds mighty impressive but how does it really perform well let's go find out shall we first let's take a look at the sequential read and write performance with a s SS D benchmark the 960 pro looks pretty mighty here reaching 2.7 gigabytes per second for the read and 2 gigabytes per second for the right compared to the 950 pro this makes the 960 pro roughly 25% faster for the read test and a little over 40 percent faster for the I test so impressive stuff here the 960 / absolutely blitzed the 4k 64 thread test and it was the right performance that was again the most impressive reaching almost 1.3 gigabytes per second the 960 pro is 80 percent faster than intel's SSD 750 series and a little over three times fast in the 950 pro given what we just saw I was expecting to see slightly better access performance especially given what the 950 pro produced still the performance here is solid in the 960 Pro is far from slow using two different data sets comprised of multiple files we measured on disk copy of performance the game data which features a mixture of small and large compressed and non compressed files allow the 960 Pro to move an incredible 1094 megabytes per second that is a staggering 68 percent performance improvement over the 950 pro although the 960 pro only managed a throughput of 542 megabytes per second for the program test which is compromised of many small non compressed files it was still over 60 percent faster than the 950 pro ok so the last test we're going to look at is the large file extraction test using 7-zip here we have measured the time it takes to complete the file extraction along with the average transfer speed the 950 Pro extracted the data at a rate of 972 megabytes per second which was 28% faster the 950 pro and 91% fast and the intel SSD 750 series it was also almost 5 times faster than a high-performance sadr SSD such as the 850 Pro this meant the test took just 39 seconds using the 960 Pro whereas the best SATA SSD takes over 3 minutes as expected Samsung's latest flagship m2 nvme SSD is fast very fast performance wise it's a good step fall from the previous 950 pro series though most owners won't feel the need to rush out an upgrade just yet as Samsung's last season m2 drives are still very capable on the other hand thews is looking to build a brand new system or just in need of a new SSD well then you're in luck as it stands there's no better option for those seeking maximum performance pricing starts at three hundred and thirty dollars for the 512 gig model and Rises as high as $1,300 for a two terabyte version and yes we are talking US dollars for these MSRP s the one turret model that I have costs a cool 630 dollars or 61 cents per gigabyte the exact same cost per gigabyte as the 512 gig model of the 950 Pro at this stage our ZT pricing isn't yet clear a direct currency conversion places the one terabyte model at around eight hundred thirty dollars and while this makes sense as its roughly twice the price as the 950 pro 512 gigabyte model so what do you guys think is the 960 pro fast enough to justify the price please be sure to give a thoughts and feelings below in the comments this has been Steve from however unboxed and hopefully I've done a good enough job sitting in for Matt on this one if I have I'll see you guys next time so those of you who already support the channel thank you so much it's truly appreciated and to those of you would like to support the channel directly I do have Amazon links and a patreon link in the video description below thanks a lot and I'll see you guys next time