In all my years in dealing with computer hardware ( No I'm not going to reveal my age), I never thought I would see the day a TB of storage drive can be shrunken down to a stick, well that day has come to fruition with Samsung's newest creation, the 960 NVME 2TB SSD.
When dealing with SSDs of this magnitude its not the storage capacity that draws the attention but its technical features, the speed of the drive and performance is what get hardware junkies like myself stoked.
With the Samsung 960 NVME m2, its a hard drive we're not use to seeing, cables aren't needed to power up this drive. There are no spinning moving parts which is what you expect from any solid state drive, importantly you don't have to contend with any data cables. Simply attach the 960 Pro to M2 slot and the computer will recognize it as a bootable drive.The key here is your motherboard have to come outfitted with an M2 slot which most highend motherboards today have, especially boards that were manufactured within the last 2 years. Now that I've given you a quick Samsung 960 intro, lets talk specs and features.
Features and Specs
Improving upon last years releasing of the 950, Samsung brings in a bevy of new features with NVMe 960, starting with the a 16-die package a and Package on Package controller/DRAM design that's cooled by a cooper heat spreader.
The Samsung NVMe SSD 960 offers up three different capacities in storage, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB, with the latter being the topic of this post.
Highlighted specs includes a new 5-core Polaris controller, a 4-Landing Design that fits four packages onto an M.2280 SSD. In detail, lets look at the Package-on-Package feature in depth. This feature have a controller and DRAM that's stacked right onto the same package, thus enabling space to be saved. Also present is a Hexadecimal Die Package, this makes the 960 Pro possible to reach 2TB in storage capacity, it has 16 48-Layer MLC NAND packages that is present within each package. Which if you follow storage technology closely, that is a enormous amount of die per package.
Performance
Lets talk about performance of the Samsung 960 NVMe SSD because that is of course the main staple of any solid state drive, the speed, how fast does it read write data.
The Sequential (MB/s) read/write measures in at 3,500 x 2100, Random (OPS) read/write 14,000 x 50,000 and finally we have Random ( OPS) read write at 440,000 x 360,000. So as you see, the Samsung 960 does not fall short in performance.
Image Source: PC Perspective
All things considering, with the mentioned features and specs which are impressive I might add, SSD's of this magnitude are pretty much aimed at the enterprising consumer base, the price most certainly reflects that at $1300. If you're thinking about accessing such great storage technology but don't want to pay the over the top price tag, you can always settle for the 512GB version which is priced reasonable at $329.00.