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.
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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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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.