The Samsung 960 Pro (2TB) SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on October 18, 2016 10:00 AM ESTFinal Words
In setting their lofty goals for the drive, the 2TB Samsung 960 Pro does not quite live up to every performance specification. But against any other standard it is a very fast drive. It increases performance over its predecessor across the board. It sets new performance records on almost every test while staying within roughly the same power and thermal limits, leading it to also set many new records for efficiency where previous PCIe SSDs have tended to sacrifice efficiency to reach higher performance.
The 960 Pro's performance even suggests that it may be a suitable enterprise SSD. While it lacks power loss protection capacitors that are still found on most enterprise SSDs (and are the reason why the longer M.2 22110 size is typically used for enterprise M.2 SSDs), the 960 Pro's performance on our random write consistency test is clearly enterprise-class and in the high-airflow environment of a server it should deliver much better sustained performance where it throttled due to high temperatures in our desktop testbed. Samsung probably won't have to change much other than the write endurance rating to make a good enterprise SSD based off this Polaris controller.
SATA SSDs are doing well to improve performance by a few percent, and power efficiency is for the most part also not improving much. PCIe 3.0 is not fully exploited by any current product, so generational improvements of NVMe SSDs can be much larger. In the SATA market gains this big would be revolutionary whether considered in terms of relative percentage improvement or absolute MB/s and IOPS gained.
On the other hand, this was a comparison of a 2TB drive against PCIe SSDs that were all much smaller; it has four times the capacity and twice the NAND die count of the largest and fastest 950 Pro. Higher capacity almost always enables higher performance, and it appears in many tests that the 512GB 960 Pro may not have much if any advantage over either its predecessor or the current fastest drive of similar capacity.
This review should not be taken as the final word on the Samsung 960 Pro. We still intend to test the smaller and more affordable capacities, and to conduct a more thorough investigation of its thermal throttling behavior. We also need to test against the Windows 10 NVMe driver and will test with any driver Samsung releases. Additionally, we look forward to testing the Samsung 960 EVO, which uses the same Polaris controller but TLC V-NAND with an SLC cache. The 960 EVO has a shorter warranty period and lower endurance rating, but still promises higher performance than the 950 Pro and at a much lower price.
The $1299 MSRP on the 2TB 960 Pro is almost as shocking as the $1499 MSRP for the 4TB 850 EVO was. This drive is not for everyone, though it might be coveted by everyone. But for those who have the money, the price per gigabyte is not outlandish. Aside from Intel's TLC-based SSD 600p, PCIe SSDs currently start around $0.50/GB, and at $0.63/GB the 960 Pro is more expensive than the Plextor M8Pe but cheaper than the Intel SSD 750 or the OCZ RD400A. Samsung is by no means price gouging and they could justify charging even more based on the performance and efficiency advantages the 960 Pro has over the competitors. The 960 Pro and 960 EVO are not yet listed on Amazon and are only listed as "Coming Soon" with no price on Newegg, but they can be pre-ordered direct from Samsung with an estimated ship time of 2-4 weeks.
The 960 Pro appears to not offer much cost savings over the 950 Pro despite the switch from 32-layer V-NAND to 48-layer V-NAND. The 48-layer V-NAND has had trouble living up to expectations and was much later to market than Samsung had planned for: the 950 Pro was initially supposed to switch over in the first half of this year and gain a 1TB capacity. This doesn't pose a serious concern for the 960 Pro, but it is clear that Samsung was too optimistic about the ease of scaling up 3D NAND and their projections for the 64-layer generation should be regarded with increased skepticism.
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DanNeely - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Does your mobo power the m.2 slot, or just the LEDs? Baring evidence to the contrary I'd assume it's only the latter that are getting power, and enough residual power to run a few LEDs for a minute would only give a few seconds for the 960 in its deepest power saving modes, or far less while doing writes.bji - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
How does your computer know to shut down in that event? Is there a signal to the operating system from the power supply to notify it that power has been lost and that it should shut down? Because if not, all that will happen is that 1 minute more of data will be written to the drive, only to be lost when the power abruptly cuts out when the capacitors lose their charge.ddriver - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Obviously it doesn't matter if the PSU doesn't send a signal to the system, which it doesn't. It wouldn't matter even if you have an UPS that could last an hour if it can't signal the system to shut down or at least flush caches before power runs out completely.noeldillabough - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
I was thinking the exact same thing ACK no battery/capacitors? I'd never turn off buffer flushing.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
I agree that what you've described is what those options *seem* to mean. But the semantics behind those checkboxes are clearly very different for NVMe drives and SATA drives, and it is an outright bug for Microsoft to apply the same description to both cases. The Samsung 960 Pro is also not the only drive to severely underperform without disabling write cache buffer flushing; the 950 Pro without Samsung's driver seems to be similar and I've seen this behavior on at least other vendor's NVMe controller. This is a serious concern that requires further investigation, but I'm not ready to lay the blame on the Samsung 960 Pro. If Microsoft's defaults for NVMe drives is the most reasonable behavior for consumer workloads (including the risk of power loss), then that would imply that most or all of the vendor-specific NVMe drivers are playing fast and loose with data safety, and possibly so are Microsoft's SATA/AHCI drivers.shodanshok - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
"that would imply that most or all of the vendor-specific NVMe drivers are playing fast and loose with data safety, and possibly so are Microsoft's SATA/AHCI drivers"This can be quite true, especially considering as some vendors publish "turbo-cached mode" that supposedly enhance disk write speed. By the way the storage controller drives is such a critical kernel component that I will try hard to stay with Microsoft own driver, unless extensive testing on vendor-specific drivers confirms their stability.
HollyDOL - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
Wouldn't INT 0 (power loss) fire fast enough to execute flush command in time for decent PSU to handle that before running out of power? Most of "decent+" PSUs seem to have quite a power buffer in capacitors to survive that long... with 300k IOPS it should manage to save with a decent margin.Even my old Corsair TX manages to survive micro-outages without computer shutting down or crashing. Afaic ATX2.01 PSU is required to endure at least 17ms power outage without losing output power. With 330k IOPS at hand it should be enough to quick save.
Not that I'd be all out to go and try :-)
beginner99 - Wednesday, October 19, 2016 - link
This would be something guys at anandtech could test. It would also probably help to build back the sites reputation and output of interesting articles.Create a script that does some file system operations, then pull the plug. Repeat 10 times for each drive, driver and settings and see what happens. Yeah a lot of work.
leexgx - Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - link
only intel SSDs that have super caps never lose data ,, Intel 320 and S3500 (some site tested it and only intel SSDs never corrupted some SSDs flat out failed the Crucial M4)http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st...
normal SSDs that have small caps (not super caps) that say they have power loss protection that is only there to protect the page table from bee trashed not the data it self that is currently been written that still be loss
Gigaplex - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
"then that would imply that most or all of the vendor-specific NVMe drivers are playing fast and loose with data safety"I would not be surprised if that's exactly what they're doing.