Samsung 960 Pro: the absolute king of SSDs.
For the shortest loading times and the best experience in games, you really cannot get away from an SSD these days. But one SSD is not the other, some scrape a few seconds off your loading time, while others chop a third or more off your loading time. And there is the Samsung 960 Pro, which according to Floris can rightly be called the king of SSDs thanks to all kinds of modern gadgets.
This article is made possible by Samsung, the content is entirely determined by Floris.
If you’ve ever had a Samsung SSD in your PC before – especially if this was an NVMe SSD – then you know how crazy fast they are. Thanks to the NVMe interface, this SSD can write about 2100MB per second, or more than 2GB every second. This is enough to write an entire 4K / HDR blu-ray in 20 seconds. The reading speed is even higher, with 3.5GB per second you can read the entire GTA V installation in eighteen and a half seconds (!).
The benchmarks show that the 1TB drive that I tested neatly meets the specifications, the Samsung 950 Pro 256GB that I compared to it has been in use for a number of years, but still shows a creditable speed compared to the much faster 960 Pro. However, the 960 Pro’s biggest pain point comes up here: the noticeable difference may not be big enough to justify the price difference compared to older – and cheaper – SSDs.
Super fast
The speed is possible because the NVMe interface that the Samsung M.2 SSDs use has a much higher maximum speed than the older SATA standard. SATA is made with hard drives in mind, so the interface is not adequate for the very fastest SSDs. Another drawback of SATA over NVMe is that SATA has to go through your motherboard chipset, while NVMe goes directly over the PCIe bus, which connects directly to your CPU. NVMe not only provides a higher speed, thanks to the M.2 form factor that Samsung has chosen you do not have to run extra cables to your SSD: all you have to do is pop it into the M.2 slot and you can get started.
Now, speed isn’t everything with an SSD, especially if it has to house your entire Steam Library. In previous generations, NVMe M.2 SSDs were limited to half a terabyte, but thanks to Samsung’s 48-layer 3D NAND, they can make one of 256Gbit. That’s an impressive number in itself (trust me), but the real innovation comes in stacking these dies to get to the 1TB and 2TB capacities. The 1TB version of the 960 Pro uses four packages of eight dies each: 4 × 8 × 256Gbit = 1TB. With the 2TB version, Samsung has managed to stack four times sixteen dies (!) On top of each other to create an M.2 SSD that can accommodate as much data as a high-end hard drive that is 100 times larger. .
Reliable
The Samsung 960 Pro is not only insanely fast, it also lasts an awful long time: you get a standard five-year warranty with your drive, but they will probably last much longer than that. For example, the 1TB version I tested is rated at 800 terabytes written. Even if you install four games every day like Battlefield 1, which is 50GB in size, your SSD will last for 10 years!
