Gadgetory

hey guys Eber here with hurricane axe and today we are talking about my food drives more specifically about non-volatile memory storage solutions otherwise known as nvme we've seen these type of drives slowly making its way into notebooks and high-end desktop systems because it promises fast efficient and compact storage that can easily be installed onto a motherboard fortunately Samson contacted us about their new 960 pro and their timing was just perfect this happens to be one of the fastest drives on the market claiming read speeds up to 3.5 gigabytes per second so I know it's bit of an overkill but I wanted to show you guys my whole experience with the upgrade and how it turned out but before that let's talk a bit more about MDOT - and its various features plus how it will factor into your purchasing decision right now MDOT - is broken into two different formats or speed bins I'm going to leave until its proprietary you - on the side lines on one hand there is a SATA based standard that operates at very much the same speeds as today's regular two and a half inch SSDs for instance take this crucial MX 300 525 gigabyte m2 SSD on the other hand there is Samsung's newer nvme format like the samsung 960 Pro which utilizes up to 4 PCIe links to potentially achieve some real incredible speeds one of the speeds being achieved you can shoot some of these drives into the enthusiast market many can be considered as great upgrades as they become more affordable people with older systems can use a SATA or nvme based m2 SSD to boost system responsiveness technically they could clone their existing Windows installation to the new Drive and then use their older slower spinning hard drives as a secondary storage platform I think this would be a better option though because higher capacity SSDs are still expensive so these drives are still not going anywhere the beauty of this upgrade path is that your motherboard doesn't even need an inductive slot for compatibility provided you buy the right components since the nvme format communicates over the PCI bus all you need is a cheap M 2 PCI a two PCIe slot adapter like this one or even this and a free motherboard PCI slot I'll make sure to leave links in the description down below let's get things off with compatibility nvme was launched right around in tow z170 launch so if your systems based off that platform or even higher you should be fine this includes X 99 X 299 some AMD in three motherboards and a few FM two-plus boards as well just make sure to check your motherboard manufacturer website first older motherboards in the z97 generation and earlier will require that adapter that I spoke about a little while ago and of course a free PCI slot many of those adapters are backwards compatible with PCIe 1.0 and 2.0 but be careful if you're all motherboard doesn't support the end gaming protocol the drive won't be bootable without jumping into a few hoops first I'll leave that guy for another video so stay tuned for that next up is size and I don't mean the capacity but the actual dimensions of the m-dot to drive generally they refer to as type 20 to 40 to 20 to 60 and 20 to 80 it's just a short code for saying how long they are in millimeters so in my case this 960 pro se from Samsung comes in 20 to 80 configuration meaning it's 80 millimeters long so make sure to check your motherboard specifications to see if it can host the type of drive that you're planning to upgrade towards soon now to quickly go over some of the system components I'm using an ASUS Maximus code motherboard it's a z2 70 based motherboard with a 7700 K 32 gigabytes of RAM 18 X 1080 and obviously my 4 terabyte Western Digital hard drive that we'll be upgrading to this monster so let's hop into the upgrade process okay guys so we finally have our system ready for the cloning process and the reason why I chose that or we're going with a fresh install of Windows it's because I have my benchmarks and/or my benchmarking programs and my game library installed on the spinning drive so cloning was the easiest way to transfer my existing files to the SSD now the first thing you want to do is head over to Samsung's official 960 Pro website and download the nvme driver once you complete that process the system will reboot and you can head over to the device manager tab to check and see if P driver is properly installed then what you want to do is initialize the drive under the disk management tab this basically creates a new partition and formats the drive so you can assign the drive letter and the name of the drive to your desire the last step is to download Samsung's data migration software this is what we'll be using to clone the existing WD drive to the 960 pro SSD the process is fairly simple samsung has done a really good job with the UI so first time users won't have a problem spotting things as you can see I chose my source desk then the target disk and proceeded with the cloning process there's also an advanced cloning option that essentially scans your existing drive and gives users the option to exclude certain folders or files that they don't necessarily need to clone this is an excellent option in my opinion because say for example if your nvme SSD is smaller and capacity when compared to the spinning drive all you need to do is clone your operating system and a few applications that you use on a regular basis and leave the rest on the hard drive Samsung's complimentary magician software is an excellent tool to monitor the SSD the user is greeted with a visual indication for the drives health status you can also update the firmware as well as check the interface type that it's running on there's also a click performance tests to check weed and white speeds a few more optimizations to increase the longevity of the drive and finally secure air base which is an excellent tool to utilize if you end up passing the SSD to someone else ok so let's talk performance and how did the drive do well all I can say is that it incredibly fast I mean check out this boot I'm comparing the old spinning drive to the 960 pro SSD the WD drive took well over 4 minutes to load up to the desktop while the nvme SSD took a little less than 50 seconds to complete that task that's 5 times faster which is awesome my next test involves a folder duplicate transfer which was about 20 gigabytes in size packed with 4k videos a few game folders and excel files the results do speak for themselves the 960 pro just blows the doors off the WP drive 5 minutes versus 50 seconds guys isn't that just amazing what about gaming well I was excited to test Ghost Recon because a it's a graphically intensive title and be loading up the game along with missions take a chunk of my time so it's a great way to test each drives we performance and just as expected the 960 pro SSD was faster during the initial game launch by about 20 seconds when compared to the spinning drive loading up a mission took roughly 18 seconds on the 960 pro SSD and 40 on the WD Blu drive quite a difference right there now don't expect to achieve higher frame rates when upgrading to the nvme SSD because you genuinely won't be able to do that in fact I did a recent video comparing the gaming performance on different types of drives so if you're interested I'll leave a link in the description down below now if you're a creative professional upgrading to the 964 SSD might be money well spent here's why I did a quick test loading up a Photoshop project that I worked on recently and the WD drive took a little over a minute to complete that task the 960 pearl on the other hand took just 10 seconds to get to my work that's a lot of time saved and if you are constantly working on client projects that requires deadlines then I can guarantee you this drive will definitely improve your workflow same story goes for Premiere Pro users this Drive just blazes through loading up projects and I can't wait to get another one for my main workstation PC so overall I'm really happy with my upgrade to the 960 Pro SSD from Samsung I mean just getting this kind of performance in a compact form factor is incredible this Drive is definitely one of the fastest that you can find in the market if you're really crazy about read and write performance and of course the benchmarks do show for themselves if you're creative professional this would be an excellent upgrade if you're a gamer and if you really don't want to wait for one or load times this is an upgrade it's a worthy upgrade in my opinion I want to hear your thoughts on the 960 Pro SSD from Samsung do you think you would consider this as an upgrade for your existing PC's let us know in the comments down below I'm Eva with her connects huge shout out to Samsung for sponsoring this video make sure to subscribe for more similar content featuring the 960 / SSD and we'll see you in the next one