Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB M.2 and 960 PRO 2TB M.2 NVMe SSDs Coming
Legit Reviews is in South Korea for Samsungs 5th annual SSD Global Summit. We weren’t sure what we’d be seeing at this years summit until we got to the hotel and saw large banners outside showing off two new consumer SSDs that we know you’ll be excited about. The first drive is the Samsung SSD 960 EVO M.2 NVMe drive series that will likely be replacing the popular Samsung SSD 850 EVO series that debuted in 2014. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO is without a doubt the best selling consumer SSD ever released, so the 960 EVO needs to deliver!
The other drive will be the Samsung SSD 960 PRO M.2 that will more than likely be the successor to last years Samsung SSD 950 PRO M.2 and be focused on the high performance consumer market. Both drives are shown in the M.2 form factor on the banner and the 960 EVO is 1TB and the 960 PRO is 2TB in capacity. Both drives will likely use Samsungs 3D V-NAND and we are guessing third-generation 48-layer VNAND on the budget friendly 960 EVO series and newer fourth-generation 64-layer VNAND (512Gb). One other thing that we noticed in the image is that the 960 EVO 1TB has a power draw rating of 2.6A and the 960 PRO 2TB is just 1A. If that is correct that shows a HUGE power drop is coming as the original 950 PRO used up to 2.7A of power.
The Samsung SM961 M.2 NVMe SSD is already available for OEM system builders and the 1TB drive features 3100 MB/sec sequential read and 1400 MB/sec sequential write speeds. The 4K random read and write performance is also impressive with promised performance of up to 450K random read IOPS as well as up to 400K random write IOPS. The SM961 is based on the companys Polaris controller as well as MLC V-NAND flash memory. It will be interesting to see how the Samsung SSD 960 PRO M.2 series differs and what they will cost. Right now a Samsung SM961 M.2 1TB SSD runs $712.99 Australian Dollar (538.66 US Dollar) over at RAM City, so that could mean a 2TB drive could be close to $1000!
The official announcement will be tomorrow, so hopefully all the details will be out soon!