Coming next month in 256GB and 512GB flavors
Samsung is joining the NVMe M.2 solid-state drive movement, with its newly announced 950 Pro PCIe SSD. The Korean tech giant made the announcement at its annual SSD Summit in Seoul earlier this morning. The 950 Pro will launch in October in 256GB and 512GB variants.
In addition to the 950 Pro announcement, Samsung also revealed that it will release 4TB traditional SATA SSDs in 2016. This is impressive considering the company only released its 2TB 850 Pro SSDs a few weeks ago.
Samsung also rebranded its 3D Nand technology, the process by which it stacks cells above cells to get higher density, as “V-Nand.”
For the uninitiated, non-volatile memory express, or “NVMe” for short, replaces the AHCI storage protocol. AHCI was never optimized for storage performance, and is ultimately the performance bottleneck for storage today. Samsung believes that with modern CPUs, motherboard BIOSs, and Windows 10, that now is the ideal time for the company to break into the NVMe storage space.
The Samsung 950 Pro will work over the PCIe 3.0 interface, feature the company’s UBX controller, use the company’s second generation MLC V-Nand 32-layer 128Gb die, and low power DDR4 DRAM. The company went with the M.2 form factor because it believes that it will continue to be more widely adopted across motherboards and will allow for easy integration into thin form factors, such as notebooks.
While enthusiasts may scoff at the storage capacity of the 950 Pro, Samsung did reveal that a 1TB NVMe solution will make its way to market in early 2016, when the company transitions over to a 48-layer V-Nand die.
In terms of comparative performance, NVMe can handle 64,000 queues as compared to AHCI’s single queue. Samsung says the 950 Pro will be able to reach read speeds up to 2,500MB/s and write speeds up to 1,500MB/s. So that’s roughly a 4.5x and 2.8x improvement over a 850 Pro SSD, respectively. Samsung says that the 950 Pro will be able to read up to 300K IOPs and write up to 110K IOPs. In a synthetic benchmark, Samsung cited roughly double performance over an 850 Pro in PC Mark 7 and nearly triple the performance in PC Mark Vantage.
When the 950 Pro launches next month, it will come with Samsung’s five-year warranty. In terms of longevity, Samsung is guaranteeing 200TB life out of the 256GB drive and 400TB out of the 512GB drive. The drives will retail for $200 and $350, respectively. Expect a full written review from us in the near future. In the meantime, check out some of Samsung's own internal benchmarks below!
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1LKgxwG
