Samsung SSD 960 EVO Review – 250GB and 1TB NVMe M.2 Drives Tested

By Nathan Kirsch

PCMark 8 Storage Test

pcmark8 logo

PCMark 8 might have come out in 2013, but it is still Futuremark’s most recent version of their industry standard PC benchmarking tool. PCMark 8 allows you to test the performance of all types of PC, from tablets to desktops. With five separate benchmark tests plus battery life testing, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance. PCMark 8 is recognized by many as being the complete PC benchmark for home and business. We ran the Storage 2.0 benchmark test suite on PCMark 8 v2.7.613 that came out in April 2016. This is a major update accommodates a change in the latest version of Adobe After Effects and provides better support for NVMe SSDs. The changes affect the workloads in the Adobe Applications benchmark and the Storage 2.0 benchmark. Scores from the new versions of these tests should not be compared with older versions, so just a heads up if you compare scores.

Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB SSD:

Samsung SSD 960 Pro PCMark 8

Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB SSD:

pcmark8-1tb-960evo

Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB SSD:

pcmark8-250gb-960evo

Benchmark Results: When it comes to PCMark 8 performance you are looking at an overall score of 5,096 on the 960 PRO 2TB, 5,069 on the 960 EVO 1TB and 5,056 on the 960 EVO 250GB drive. All these scores are really close, but if you look at the storage bandwidth ratings you’ll see the 960 Pro 2TB drive scores 727.74 MB/s versus 526.03 MB/s on the Samsung 960 EVO 1TB and 468.18 MB/s on the Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250 GB drive.