Samsung SSD 960 Evo: The PCIe SSD mainstream champion

Note: This article was first published on 16th November 2016, and is now re-published as the product is now widely available at retailers.

The reign of Evo

Samsung’s consumer SSDs can be broadly divided into two categories: Pro and Evo. The Pro drives are for power-hungry enthusiasts, while the Evo drives are for mainstream users seeking something faster than your traditional mechanical hard disk drives. That said, the Samsung’s Evo series of drives doesn’t scrimp on performance either, despite what their entry-level positioning might lead you to think.

The old SSD 850 Evo and the even older SSD 840 Evo are fine examples. Even though both drives used more affordable TLC NAND, they offered very decent performance and were attractively priced. This combination of competitive performance and affordability would become a hallmark of Samsung’s Evo SSD series.

Samsung is keen to uphold this fine tradition and alongside the SSD 960 Pro, they also announced the new SSD 960 Evo. So how does this drive differ from the SSD 960 Pro and how does it perform? Read on to find out.

The SSD 960 Evo

Like the SSD 960 Pro, the SSD 960 Evo is presently only offered in the M.2 2280 form factor. Samsung also said that there are no plans for a PCIe add-in card version right now, but will certainly consider here’s demand for it. As such, the SSD 960 Evo is incredibly small and compact and can be used for notebook upgrades if your notebook using an M.2 SSD. The SSD 960 Evo will come in three capacities: 250GB, 500GB and 1TB.

And like the SSD 960 Pro, the stunning performance of the SSD 960 Evo is said to be possible because of Samsung’s new Polaris controller. We know few details about this new controller except that it is substantially more powerful than UBX controller found in the SSD 960 Pro. While the UBX controller has three ARM cores, the Polaris has five ARM cores, with one of them dedicated solely to communication with the host system.

The key difference between the SSD 960 Pro and SSD 960 Evo is the type of memory. The SSD 960 Pro uses MLC V-NAND, while the SSD 960 Evo uses TLC V-NAND, specifically Samsung’s latest 48-layer TLC V-NAND. If you are unaware of the differences between MLC and TLC NAND, the latter stores more data per cell and is less expensive because more dies can be harvested from a single wafer. And because it stores more data per cell, it is also slower than MLC NAND. To read more about the difference between MLC and TLC NAND, take a look at our review of the SSD 840 Evo, which was one of the earliest drives to use TLC NAND.

As for performance, Samsung is claiming sequential read and write speeds of around 3,200MB/s and 1,900MB/s respectively. Whereas random read and write performance is rated at above 300,000 IOPs. These numbers are even higher than the SSD 950 Pro! To give you a better idea of how fast the SSD 960 Evo is, take a look at the table below where we have summarized Samsung's published performance figures of their M.2 SSDs.

To overcome the performance disadvantage that is inherent in TLC NAND, the SSD 960 Evo features Samsung’s TurboWrite technology. TurboWrite is a caching technology that we have seen Samsung employ in their earlier TLC NAND SSDs, and in fact by many other SSD manufacturers with TLC NAND SSDs. What it does is it dedicates unused portions of its memory to function as an SLC write buffer to speed up write performance, which is typically the weakest performance aspect of TLC NAND SSDs.

Because the SSD 960 Evo uses the higher bandwidth PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, Samsung has also tweaked how TurboWrite works on this drive. In Samsung’s SATA-based drives, the TurboWrite cache is typically just 3GB. In the SSD 960 Evo, the buffer can be dynamically adjusted and in the 500GB drive, the buffer can go up to as large as 22GB. One thing to note is that TurboWrite only works if you have free space. But more importantly, without TurboWrite, performance does take a considerable dip. Here’s a table showing the size of the TurboWrite cache for the various capacities of the SSD 960 Evo and how performance is affected without TurboWrite.

Thanks to the new controller and NAND, endurance has also been improved across all capacities. The unit we have on hand is the 500GB variant, and compared to the 500GB SSD 850 Evo, rated endurance has been enhanced by about 33% - 200TBW vs. 150TBW. 

This is the same improvement for the 250GB variant of the SSD 960 Evo - 100TBW for the SSD 960 Evo vs. 75TBW for the SSD 850 Evo. The greatest improvement in endurance comes in the 1TB variant. The 1TB SSD 960 Evo is rated good for 400TBW, while the 1TB SSD 850 Evo is rated good for 150TBW.

Identical to the SSD 960 Pro, the SSD 960 Evo also supports hardware encryption in the form of 256-bit AES encryption and TCG Opal. The SSD 960 Evo also features Dynamic Thermal Guard protection, a technology that debuted on older Samsung drives and what it does is that it cuts back on performance to reduce power consumption and heat until the temperature of the drive falls back within safe confines. Essentially, this is thermal throttling and it is the same practice is used in CPUs and GPUs as well.

To reduce the occurrence of thermal throttling, Samsung has added an adhesive label to the back of the SSD 960 Evo. Within this label is a thin piece of copper, which Samsung says improves thermal efficiency by around 30%. 

And finally, Samsung have also introduced a new version of Samsung Magician with the SSD 960 Evo, which will come with a redesigned interface and some new features. One of the new features that was revealed to us at the Global SSD Summit was secure file erase. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to get a copy of the new Magician software for this review.

Now let’s see what this drive is capable of and how it measures up against other high-end PCIe-based SSDs.

Test Setup

The drives will be tested on our updated storage testbed using the Windows 10 operating system, which has the following specifications:

• Intel Core i7-4770K (3.5GHz)
• ASUS Z97-Deluxe/USB 3.1 (Intel Z97 chipset)
• 2 x 4GB DDR3-1600 memory
• MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
• Windows 10 Pro

Here is the list of benchmarks used:

• AS-SSD benchmark 1.8.5636.36856
• CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2
• PCMark 8 (Storage suite)
• Atto Disk Benchmark 3.0.5
• Iometer (version 2006.07.27)

Obviously, we are not expecting the SSD 960 Evo to be able to match the lofty standards set by the incredibly fast SSD 960 Pro. However, on paper at least, the SSD 960 Evo should be more than a match for the SSD 950 Pro - Samsung’s last flagship consumer SSD. And that’s what we will be interested to find out, is the SSD 960 Evo faster or as fast as the SSD 950 Pro. 

It will also be interesting to see how the SSD 960 Evo matches up against the new crop of PCIe-based SSDs such as the OCZ RD400 and Plextor M8Pe, and so we have included their results in this review. We didn’t include numbers of the ADATA XPG SX8000 because we felt that the XPG SX8000 is not competitive enough to be of consideration. Although, it’s the most affordable PCIe-based SSD by far, users do have to sacrifice quite a bit in the way of performance.

The following drives were tested for this review:

• Samsung SSD 960 Evo
• Samsung SSD 960 Pro
• Samsung SSD 950 Pro
• OCZ RD400
• Plextor M8Pe

PCMark 8

PCMark 8 is the most up-to-date system benchmarking software from benchmarking specialists Futuremark. It was designed for Windows 8 machines (now updated for Windows 10) and the storage suite test puts drives through a collection of 10 different real life workloads involving applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Word, Excel and even games like Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft.

The SSD 960 Evo began brightly on PCMark 8 with a score of 5061 and a recorded average speed of 469.17MB/s. It’s not quite as fast as the SSD 960 Pro or SSD 960 Evo, but its a respectable showing as it managed to outperform the Plextor M8Pe.

CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 Results

CrystalDiskMark is an easy-to-run and quick utility to use to gauge a drive’s performance. It measures sequential read and write performance and random read and write speeds of random 4KB and 4KB (queue depth 32) data. 

The new Samsung SSD 960 Evo nearly matched the sequential write performance of its costlier 960 Pro brother and while still somewhat behind the Pro class drives on read performance, it still ranked remarkably well against the competition.

Moving on, its performance on the 4K and more intensive 4K, 32 queue depth workloads were impressive as well. On the 4K workload, it was more than a match for the SSD 950 Pro and comfortably saw off challenges from the OCZ RD400 and Plextor M8Pe. On the 4K, 32 queue depth workload, it was on a par with the SSD 960 Pro and faster than SSD 950 Pro and Plextor M8Pe. All things considered, its performance is certainly nothing to scoff at, despite its use of slower TLC V-NAND.

AS SSD 1.8.5636.36856 Results

AS SSD is a benchmark that uses non-compressible and completely random data. This benchmark is useful because some controllers, like the once popular but now defunct SandForce SF-2281, compress data first before moving them around. However, with non-compressible and random data, controllers cannot compress the data first, which forces them to deal with data as they are. Therefore, this is a useful benchmark to prevent drivers using controllers like the SF-2281 controller or similar from gaining an upper hand.

On AS SSD’s Copy benchmark, the SSD 960 Evo was comfortably faster than the OCZ RD400 and Plextor M8Pe. It was a good match for the SSD 950 Pro as well, besting it on the ISO and Game workloads. The SSD 960 Pro was the fastest drive overall in this benchmark.

The SSD 960 Evo proved to have very fast sequential performance as its sequential read and write speeds were beyond every drive, other than the SSD 960 Pro. Yes, the SSD 960 Evo even outpaced the SSD 950 Pro. 

Its performance on the 4K and more intensive 4K, 64 queue depth workloads were equally impressive. On the 4K workload, the SSD 960 Evo held its own and recorded very respectable numbers. And on the 4K, 64 queue depth workload, its performance was even more impressive as it came very close to the SSD 960 Pro and easily outperformed all the other drives.

ATTO Disk Benchmark 3.0.2 Results

ATTO is one of the oldest benchmarks around, but it’s still a useful tool to gauge a drive’s adeptness at managing compressible data. It’s also useful for seeing how a drive performs across a variety of different transfer block size. The ATTO Disk Benchmark has always favored drives with strong sequential read and write performance, so it is not surprising at all to see the SSD 960 Evo excel here. Across all three workloads, the SSD 960 Evo recorded very impressive numbers, especially on the 8MB and 32KB workloads. On the smallest 4K data block workload, its read and write speeds were easily on a par with the SSD 960 Pro, SSD 950 Pro, and the OCZ RD400.

Iometer Results (Part 1)

Lastly, we put the drives through the rigorous grind of Iometer, with different workloads and I/O queue depths. We have chosen to show results from a queue depth of 1 to 5 as this better represents the workloads a typical consumer might face. Iometer is our most rigorous benchmark, and it will be interesting to see how the SSD 960 Evo fares here. Most TLC NAND-based SSDs typically don’t do too well here as their buffers are often exhausted. But as the results here show, the SSD 960 Evo held up well, thanks to its extra large buffer. 

It recorded the highest read speeds and its write speeds were pretty decent as well. Overall, its read and write speeds were easily higher than that of the SSD 950 Pro, which is quite amazing given that the SSD 950 Pro is still a very competitive drive. But on the more intensive File and Web Server workloads, we see that the SSD 960 Evo suffered a little. It was the lowest on the File Server workload, and its performance on the Web Server workload was only average.

Iometer Results (Part 2)

Finally, we look at the I/O response times for the workloads reported on the previous page. The SSD 960 Evo’s response times were pretty decent throughout. Since it recorded the highest Streaming Reads performance, its average response times for that workload were the quickest. On the other hand, we can see that its average response times for the File Server workload, which it did badly, were the highest.

An all-round stunner

SSDs with TLC NAND have traditionally been significantly slower than SSDs with MLC NAND, and we were not expecting this to change with the SSD 960 Evo. And frankly, we were quite surprised by Samsung’s claimed performance figures. Can a TLC NAND SSD be so fast? It turns out that it can.

Thanks to a combination of Samsung’s new Polaris controller, 48-layer TLC NAND, and a significantly larger TurboWrite cache, the SSD 960 Evo blew our expectations out of the water. Despite its use of slower TLC NAND, the SSD 960 Evo is by no means a slow drive. As our results clearly show, it is mostly as quick as if not faster than the SSD 950 Pro, and also other new PCIe-based SSDs like the OCZ RD400 and Plextor M8Pe, and only showed sings of slowing down in the most intensive of benchmarks. Only the flagship SSD 960 Pro was capable of outperforming, but even so, the margin wasn’t much.

And with a price of S$349 for the 500GB variant that we tested here, the new SSD 960 Evo successfully carries on the Evo tradition of offering great performance and value. At this price, it makes a very strong case for itself as it is significantly more affordable than any other comparable PCIe-based SSD in the market. 

The only downsides to the SSD 960 Evo that we can think of is its lower endurance and shorter 3-year warranty. For the same capacity, the SSD 960 Pro offers double the endurance (400TBW) and a longer 5-year warranty. But let’s be honest, at 200TBW, you are still looking at 180GB/day over the course of its 3-year warranty period. 

And if you were to compare with brands outside of Samsung, 200TBW is just 96TB down on the 512GB OCZ RD400’s endurance rating of 296TBW. Even the smallest 250GB variant of the SSD 960 Evo will offer endurance of 100TBW or around 90GB/day, which plenty for most users. So clearly, the SSD 960 Evo still offers plenty of endurance, and only the heaviest of heavy users will require the extra endurance offered by the SSD 960 Pro.

In closing, the SSD 960 Evo performs so well and is so attractively priced that it makes you wonder if it is really necessary to fork out more for the SSD 960 Pro, or indeed any other drive? The answer is probably no, you don't.

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.