That's an insane amount of data and you'd be filling the entire drive every few days at that rate. Putting 200TB worth of writes into perspective, over a three-year warranty period you would have to be writing 182GB per day to reach the advertised limit of safe writes. As such, the warranty period offered by Samsung has been reduced from five years to three. The 960 Pro 512GB model for example sports an endurance rating of 400 terabytes written and that figure has been halved for the 500GB Evo model. The use of TLC memory brings three key differences for the Evo series: probably least concerning is the reduced endurance rating, though the slightly lower performance isn't that worrying either, whereas the cost savings will likely be of interest to many of you.Ĭompared to MLC which stores two bits per cell, TLC stores three bits per cell to improve density (capacity), but in doing so reduces performance and most crucially endurance. Watch our video review of the 960 Evo or read on for the full written review. With that, we're keen to see what Samsung's TLC NVMe SSD brings to the table. The new Evo series should also compare strongly against Crucial's TLC-based MX300, which claims sequential read speeds of 530MB/s and write speeds of 510MB/s.

In other words, you'd be paying over 20% less for the 960 Evo than the Pro and yet the impact on performance could be considerably less than that. Although the 960 Evo has been outfitted with TLC memory instead of MLC, the claimed impact on performance is minor with sequential read speeds dropping from 3.5GB/s to 3.2GB/s and write throughput going from 2.1GB/s to 1.9GB/s. Like the 960 Pro, the 960 Evo is powered by Samsung's Polaris controller coupled with Samsung's 48-layer V-NAND. That's still pretty pricey compared to TLC SATA drives such as the Crucial MX300, but we also expect the 960 Evo to have a performance advantage.

The crazy thing here is that the 250GB model costs $130, taking the cost per gigabyte for this series down to ~$0.50. Remedying this concern, Samsung has unleashed its more affordable 960 Evo series, which is also made in a smaller 250GB capacity. The only drawback to Samsung's new series so far appears to be the price and while not outrageous by any means, a cost of $0.64/GB for the cheapest model is still expensive. The 960 Pro's class-leading M.2 NVMe performance, excellent endurance ratings, and five-year warranty positioned it as the fastest consumer-grade SSD power users could hope to get their hands on. It's been a rather long wait for enthusiasts and while it should be possible to order a 960 Pro, the drive is currently out of stock in all capacities on Newegg and strangely the 1TB variant isn't expected to show until January 2.

We liked what we saw when we tested Samsung's SSD 960 Pro nearly a month ago, however availability for the company's new flagship M.2 NVMe SSD has been spotty at best.

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