Tuesday, September 13th 2016
Samsung Readies SSD 960 EVO Based on New "Polaris" Controller
Samsung is giving finishing touches to a new line of PCI-Express solid-state drives (SSDs) that offer performance that matches or beats the current SSD 950 Pro series, at lower price-points, the 960 EVO. These drives leverage the company's 48-layer 3D-VNAND flash memory, and the new "Polaris" SSD controller by Samsung, to serve up performance that beats the 950 Pro. Samsung could transfer some of the cost-savings in using the inexpensive flash standard to the consumer, highlighted by the company's decision to brand these drives "EVO."
Tom's Hardware discovered that the Samsung PM961 drives are analogous to the 960 EVO, featuring identical components - the "Polaris" controller, and 48-layer TLC 3D-VNAND flash chips . These drives come in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB, with sequential transfer rates of up to 3000 MB/s reads, with up to 1150 MB/s writes; up to 360,000 IOPS 4K random-read, and up to 280,000 IOPS 4K random-write. The 960 EVO will ship in M.2 NGFF-2280 and PCIe add-on card form-factors, with PCI-Express 3.0 x4 bus interfaces. The drives will support the NVMe protocol.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
Tom's Hardware discovered that the Samsung PM961 drives are analogous to the 960 EVO, featuring identical components - the "Polaris" controller, and 48-layer TLC 3D-VNAND flash chips . These drives come in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB, with sequential transfer rates of up to 3000 MB/s reads, with up to 1150 MB/s writes; up to 360,000 IOPS 4K random-read, and up to 280,000 IOPS 4K random-write. The 960 EVO will ship in M.2 NGFF-2280 and PCIe add-on card form-factors, with PCI-Express 3.0 x4 bus interfaces. The drives will support the NVMe protocol.
48 Comments on Samsung Readies SSD 960 EVO Based on New "Polaris" Controller
And larger drives exist. 512GB drives are the price/$ kings right now. 1TB drvies are becoming more affordable (my mushkin 1TB SSD was only $240) and you can always use more then 1 drive. 1TB will still hold quite a few games, and two 1TB SSDs in raid 0 would hold, more then likely, more games than you play in a years time.
For slower internet speeds, just do what the rest of the world does. external HDDs are cheap, and using two of them (mirrors of each other) to hold STEAM games and simply transferring them to your PC to play them is an age old trick, and one that works well. a 4TB passport is $150.
So, I guess the point is, buy a bigger drive. 250GB is bottom of the barrel for decent drives now, and $/GB is nowhere near as ridiculous as you act like it is. 1TB drives are less then half the price they were a year and a half ago, 2TB drives are coming down in price, ece. 512 was as large as they went three years ago. I fail to see a reason somebody would need 2+TB of games all at the same time. Even at 50GB apiece, thats still 40 games. Your own rotation is 4 games, two of which are nowhere near 50GB. overwatch is only 30GB. Given a SSD can endure hundreds of TB of writes, transferring a game or two a month isnt going to kill them. using the drive as swap does far more damage then swapping out a game here and there.
Allthough buying a small SSD just for games and constantly replacing the games on this SSD due to limited space might trigger that emergency state sooner than later. :)
""Intel's 335 Series failed much earlier, though to be fair, it pulled the trigger itself. The drive's media wear indicator ran out shortly after 700TB, signaling that the NAND's write tolerance had been exceeded. Intel doesn't have confidence in the drive at that point, so the 335 Series is designed to shift into read-only mode and then to brick itself when the power is cycled. Despite suffering just one reallocated sector, our sample dutifully followed the script. Data was accessible until a reboot prompted the drive to swallow its virtual cyanide pill.""
Also a great story to hammer home the point, "there are 2 kinds of people, those who have backups, and those who havent lost data yet"
Just look at the figures for the 850Pro 1TB drive: writing 100GB with a write amplification of 3x every day onto the drive will last the drive a whopping 56years...
This is probably enough for any gamer. :rolleyes:
I'm not 100% sure, that difference may just be NVMe vs AHCI instead. But there is some improvement going for Pro. I still went for the EVO, though. Good enough for what I need.
So there you could see a performance boost of the *951 NVMe variant over the *951 AHCI variant, allthough it was not that great, especially in real world usage scenarios.
If you look at a proper review with a good selection of different workloads for lets say the 850 series as the last-gen drives from Samsung that came as PRO and EVO variants, the EVO is sometime in the lead and sometimes its the PRO. So overall on average maybe a little advantage for the PRO, but nothing special.
For instance take a look here: www.anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review
So only the smaller EVO variants (<= 512GB) uses a lower end controller (Samsung MGX).
The specs of these controllers are as follows:
- Samsung MGX (850 EVO <= 512GB): 2 cores, 550 MHz, max. 512MB LPDDR2 RAM
- Samsung MEX (850 PRO <= 1TB, 850 EVO 1TB): 3 cores, 400MHz, max. 1GB LPDDR2 RAM
- Samsung MHX (850 PRO/EVO >= 2TB): 3 cores, 400MHz, max. 2GB LPDDR3 RAM
Architecture is ARM Cortex R4 on all of those controllers, if that matters.What I was trying to say is that I don't know how much of the improved random performance of the Pro is due to the use of MLC and how much is due to the protocol.
As I mentioned bevor, there are the OEM variants of the 950 called SM951, which are similiar to the 950 PRO. The SM951 existed in AHCI and in NVMe flavor, but both are M.2 PCIe drives and used the same UBX controller from Samsung like the 950 PRO does.
I haven't read this, but that was the first review Google spit out about the topic: www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-sm951-nvme-versus-ahci-sata,4137.html
If I remember this correctly, than those drives performed nearly identical, except for random read workloads with higher queue depth, where NVMe is superior to AHCI due to reduced protocol overhead?! So nothing particularly relevant for single user workloads, especially for playing games.
Maybe the overall performance is still not high enough for NVMe to truely shine... ;)
As you said, NVMe is pretty far ahead at higher queue depths, but my feeling is it's the flash itself that currently limits the QD1 performance. Which is sad, because we only see the industry moving towards slower flash in order to cut costs and increase capacity.
On the other hand, why am I complaining, my storage is faster than ever.