The Samsung 960 EVO (1TB) Review
by Billy Tallis on November 15, 2016 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here.
As with the previous ATSB tests, the 960 EVO can't quite keep pace with Samsung's MLC-based 950 Pro and 960 Pro SSDs, but it is slightly faster than the OCZ RD400. On this test the 960 EVO suffers relatively more from a full drive, where it falls behind the RD400.
Average service times are slightly slower for the 960 EVO than Samsung's other PCIe SSDs, and the competing PCIe SSDs are a step further behind.
The 960 EVO is tied for first place with minimal high-latency outliers, but all of the PCIe SSDs are much better than the SATA drives.
Once again the 960 EVO's power efficiency is about the same as Samsung's other drives, showing that its higher instantaneous power draw than SATA drives is compensated by it completing the test quicker.
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ddriver - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
TOMs has tested it. As expected, it is marginally slower.Bensant - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Just received my 960 Pro today, installed and everything is working properly apart from the Samsung driver. Have spent the last 40mins trying to locate the NVME 2.0 driver to no avail. Would anyone have a link to it yet? Or is it still unavailable and coming with the new magician software at the end of the month?XabanakFanatik - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Yeah, you should be able to use the version 1.0 driver until they finally get around to releasing the new one with Magician 5.0.What capacity pro did you buy that you actually received this early? 512GB?
Bensant - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Idk that's a bit funny then, the original drivers (For the 950 pro) failed to detect my 960 pro for some reason. It's been installed and is booting as my OS drive too, just using the Microsoft driver!And yeah, was the 512GB that I ordered, couldn't exactly justify getting the higher capacities after just spending more then $4000 on a new triple monitor setup haha
jeffbui - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
Benchmarks are great but where are the real world measurements? How will this affect me vs the other drives?jeffbui - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614Look at all the real world measurements: Game load times, application load times, multitasking performance,
Billy Tallis - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Kristian did a good job of explaining why we rely on playing back traces of real-world I/O rather than re-running the applications themselves: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8979/samsung-sm951-5...It has only gotten more impractical to build a valid and reproducible application benchmark suite, to the point that any such system would have to be cut off from the Internet to prevent automatic updates from changing the conditions of the test.
From the perspective of the SSD, our ATSB trace-based tests present a nearly identical workload to running the applications themselves, but with far better reproducibility. It might be possible to improve how we present the results of those three tests, but I do not believe that splitting those traces into a dozen different scenarios would make it any easier to come to a purchasing decision than by considering the measurements we currently report.
RaistlinZ - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
I'm currently using an 850 EVO on my ASUS X99 Pro motherboard. Will my mobo fully support the 960? Also, is it better to do a fresh Windows 10 install on an NVMe drive, or does cloning still work well?ghojezz - Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - link
I don't understand, anandtech's using Z97 Deluxe for benchmark but it only supports 10Gbps M.2 Bandwidth, right? So theoretically, you didn't push 960 to its max performance. Anyone care to explain?Billy Tallis - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
The motherboard's built-in M.2 slot is not used, because it does not permit measuring power consumption. M.2 PCIe drives are connected through an adapter and riser card to the primary PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, which will continue to be sufficient until PCIe 4 SSDs and motherboards arrive.