The Samsung 960 EVO (1TB) Review
by Billy Tallis on November 15, 2016 10:00 AM ESTATTO
ATTO's Disk Benchmark is a quick and easy freeware tool to measure drive performance across various transfer sizes.
By the end of the test, the 960 EVO and 960 Pro are performing identically. The 960 EVO takes longer to get up to full read speed, and the 960 Pro turns in some slightly better write speeds before thermal throttling levels things out.
AS-SSD
AS-SSD is another quick and free benchmark tool. It uses incompressible data for all of its tests, making it an easy way to keep an eye on which drives are relying on transparent data compression. The short duration of the test makes it a decent indicator of peak drive performance.
Both AS-SSD sequential tests show that the 960 EVO's peak performance really is second only to the 960 Pro, even if in longer tests some other models are able to outperform the 960 EVO.
Idle Power Consumption
Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands. Our testbed doesn't support the deepest DevSlp power saving mode that SATA drives can implement, but we can measure the power usage in the intermediate slumber state where both the host and device ends of the SATA link enter a low-power state and the drive is free to engage its internal power savings measures.
We also report the drive's idle power consumption while the SATA link is active and not in any power saving state. Drives are required to be able to wake from the slumber state in under 10 milliseconds, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to add latency to a burst of I/O. Because of this, many desktops default to either not using SATA Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) at all or to only enable it partially without making use of the device-initiated power management (DIPM) capability. Additionally, SATA Hot-Swap is incompatible with the use of DIPM, so our SSD testbed usually has DIPM turned off during performance testing.
Idle power for the 960 EVO is the same as for the 960 Pro. Our usual testbed configuration does not engage any explicit power saving modes so the 960 EVO idles at 1.2 W where most SATA drives will draw much less than 1W. On systems that make use of NVMe power saving capabilities, idle power will be only a few times higher than the best SATA drives, and this is without making full use of PCIe link power management.
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ex_User - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Vaporware. 'Nuff said.Magichands8 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
This is magnificent! Not only has Samsung produced an SSD that under performs its own previous generation product but one that manages to do so while using even MORE power at an even HIGHER price per GB! They even put it on a form factor that makes the drive almost entirely irrelevant! The only thing missing is a feature that makes the modules randomly explode upon contact with the users computer.Dug - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
What are you talking about?BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
You have a unique perspective. :)Daggoth - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I have a question, isn't the z97 chipset capped at 2GB per second due to DMI 2.0? Isn't this a problem for the max sequential reads?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I test PCIe SSDs in the primary PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, because the riser card used for power measurement is a 16-lane low-profile card.Bullwinkle J Moose - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
The 960 Pro is much better price over the duration of WarrantyI can generally kill 1 out of 4 SSD's within the warranty period
so if I buy 4 960 Pro's and 4-960 EVO's, here is the breakdown @ 500GB
4-960 Pro's = $330 X 4 or $1320 divided by 5yr warranty = $264 per year for 5 years
or
4-960 EVO's = $250 X 4 or $1000 divided by 3 years = $333.33 per year for 3 years
per year cost under warranty is WAY better for the PRO!
3 year warranty with TLC just doesn't do it for me
Bullwinkle J Moose - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I would REALLY need to be trying to kill at least 1 out of 4 but I could prolly do itSo tell me more about the internal speed Billy.....
How many seconds does it take to copy and paste 100GB to and from the same 960EVO?
and from the 960PRO?
shabby - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Why wasn't the 256gb version tested? Tom reviewed it and it was kinda meh compared to the rest of the mlc drives, it was as bad as the 600p in some cases.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
The 250GB was tested. It died. See page 1 for details.