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

By Nathan Kirsch November 15, 2016

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The Samsung SSD 960 EVO M.2 NVMe 250GB and 1TB PCIe SSDs both have exceptional performance and show that you can get amazing performance without having to break the bank. The performance of the 960 EVO was greater than last years 950 PRO flagship SSD in many benchmarks. This is the first time we have seen Samsung TurboWrite technology on an NVMe SSD and it looks pretty solid despite not being able to tinker with it fully yet. The ability to adjust the cache from 6GB to 42GB on the 1TB drive will be nice. If you hammer on the drive and fill the cache up you’ll see big write performance difference between the Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB and 1TB drives. If you don’t do many long writes to your storage drives, the Samsung SSD 960 EVO offers solid performance and a much better price than the Samsung SSD 960 PRO series. If you want the best possible drive or do many large sustained writes the Samsung SSD 960 PRO is still the drive to beat.

When it comes to pricing on the 960 EVO series drives you are looking at between $0.48 and $0.52 per GB. Not that bad considering the 960 PRO series runs between $0.63 and $0.65 per GB. Having over 3 GB/s sequential read speeds and up to nearly 2 GB/s sequential write speeds for around $0.50 per GB is going to be amazing for enthusiasts or anyone that is looking to try a high-end PCIe SSD for the very first time. If you have an older system that still has a traditional hard drive and you build a new system with a 960 EVO PCIe SSD inside of it, you’ll see night and day change in boot times and pretty much any task that requires the disk to be accessed.

Samsung SSD 960 EVO Series MSRP:

250GB – $129 ($0.52 per GB)
500GB – $249 ($0.50 per GB)
1TB- $479 ($0.48 per GB)

The Samsung SSD 960 PRO series is still the ultimate M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD, but the Samsung SSD 960 EVO isn’t much slower and the price versus performance metric is better on 960 EVO series. We see these drives being extremely popular and selling well in the months and years ahead. We can’t wait to try the re-designed Samsung Magician utility on the SSD 960 EVO, but that won’t be released until the end of the month.

Legit Bottom Line: The Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB and 250GB drives are wicked fast, affordable and show that traditional hard drives and SATA III based SSDs are no longer viable options for high-end computing.