Samsung Readies SSD 960 EVO Based on New "Polaris" Controller

[Breit]

I don't understand - are these already being sold under a different name?

P.S. What's the difference between Pro and EVO again? I'm not sure how this is supposed to be faster AND cheaper.

They are comparing this 960 EVO to the previous generation 950 Pro. so don't get confused by that. There will also be a 960 Pro someday.

The "Pro" drives from Samsung (or in the OEM naming scheme, the SM*** drives) are more or less the same in performance to the EVO series (or PM*** for the OEM variants), maybe a tad faster but not by much. BUT they usually have a much higher endurance (total bytes written to the drive before it wears out) due to better flash chips and as such do often come with a much longer warranty period. This warranty thing usually don't apply to the OEM drives of course.

The 850Pro for instance has 10 years warranty, wheras the 850Evo only has 5 years. For the 950Pro it also was only 5 years, but this was probably because there never was a 950Evo released.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

I already use one as a system drive / page file, though it does speed up the process of loading these large games, it still takes ages to load. Getting another SSD drive of equal size and swapping out games by downloading what you need at the time won't help me either, for various reasons like:

• Not everyone lives in a first world country where you can download these games in less than 10 minutes. because they have 100Mbps / 1Gbps Fibre connections.
• Simply; it's annoying to swap between games, hell, sometimes I play FPS games like Overwatch, Battlefield, CSS, after that, maybe World of Warcraft to chill after a FPS shooter and other single player games. I really don't want to download something first that I have decided to play on a whim. It's easier to download everything on large storage space and click "Play" when I want to play a said game. This point and above go hand in hand and can make it extremely annoying if circumstances don't allow it.
• Swapping large data/games around like this will kill your drive in no time flat, don't pass the 5 year warranty mark (in my case) and don't get to collect a new drive.

It makes a massive difference between load times when it comes to larger games if you are using both a SSD for a system/page file drive and a dedicated SSD game drive. My problem is; after all this time we have had the technology, the $/GB has remained ridiculous. Data size keeps increasing but we are being limited by these idiotic things and it's come to a point for me where it's absurd and annoying.

That's an extreme way of looking at it. All four game you just listed would easily fit on a 250GB drive also holding the OS, with room to spare.

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.

 

[Breit]

"To brick" means the drives aren't even bootable anymore. It's what most drives do. They don't even show up in BIOS anymore or they show, but aren't usable anymore.

Yeah well, but this scenario of a worn out drive is rather unlikely to happen for a modern SSD used as a system drive, even under heavy load/usage in any reasonable amount of time.

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.

 

[hojnikb]

"To brick" means the drives aren't even bootable anymore. It's what most drives do. They don't even show up in BIOS anymore or they show, but aren't usable anymore.

Thats exactly what happens with intel drive

""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.""

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Thats exactly what happens with intel drive

""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.""

odd behavior, firmware glitch? but really, 700 freaking TB of writes. That's insane. also insane that several of them went above 1PB.

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"

 

[Breit]

...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.

Maybe that article supports your statement: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8239/update-on-samsung-850-pro-endurance-vnand-die-size

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.

 

[bug]

They are comparing this 960 EVO to the previous generation 950 Pro. so don't get confused by that. There will also be a 960 Pro someday.

The "Pro" drives from Samsung (or in the OEM naming scheme, the SM*** drives) are more or less the same in performance to the EVO series (or PM*** for the OEM variants), maybe a tad faster but not by much. BUT they usually have a much higher endurance (total bytes written to the drive before it wears out) due to better flash chips and as such do often come with a much longer warranty period. This warranty thing usually don't apply to the OEM drives of course.

The 850Pro for instance has 10 years warranty, wheras the 850Evo only has 5 years. For the 950Pro it also was only 5 years, but this was probably because there never was a 950Evo released.

Oh, I think Pros win even on the performance front. Sequential speeds may be roughly the same, but that's irrelevant. Because of the faster access speed, I think random reads/writes are better on the Pro drives.
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.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Maybe that article supports your statement: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8239/update-on-samsung-850-pro-endurance-vnand-die-size

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.

Exactly, and thats the 1TB drive. Even the 256GB drive, which would be subjected to more transfers, would still last 14 years under that kind of punishment.

 

[Octopuss]

I'm afraid I will be spending disgusting amounts of dough next year. 500 or 1TB NVMe SSD and a new graphic card. I'm glad technology is not advancing even faster or I'd have to suck dicks for money

 

[Breit]

Oh, I think Pros win even on the performance front. Sequential speeds may be roughly the same, but that's irrelevant. Because of the faster access speed, I think random reads/writes are better on the Pro drives.
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.

PRO vs. EVO has nothing to do with NVMe vs. AHCI. For Samsung drives, the latest M.2 drives that could be bought as NVMe or AHCI variants are those SM951/PM951 OEM drives. The 950PRO was NVMe only and I guess the 960EVO/PRO will also be NVMe only.

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: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review

 

[Breit]

In the past, EVO featured slightly less powerful SSD controller.

This is not always true: The Samsung 850 EVO 1TB features the exact same controller as the Samsung 850PRO (Samsung MEX controller), which is also used on all the smaller 850 PROs. The Samsung 850 EVO 2TB and 4TB variants also uses the same controller as the 850 PRO 2TB (Samsung MHX).
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.

 

[bug]

PRO vs. EVO has nothing to do with NVMe vs. AHCI.

Except that, afaik, the 950 Pro is NVMe only and 850 EVO is AHCI only. A distinction that may be with a us for a few more years, until NVMe becomes ubiquitous.

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.

 

[$ReaPeR$]

I have yet to hear about such drive. I really don't understand what moron designed them to brick themselves after power cycling. How in hell would you know it's the drive that went into that state? First thing most users do when things don't work is restart the system. It's just calling for disaster.
Windows should simply say the drive is operating in read-only mode and all the changes needed for operation of the OS are being stored in memory. This way you could still copy data off the system to other drive and then throw it away. With power cycle bricking (which is what 100% of drives does at the moment afaik) it's just useless.

you are correct sir! i was under the impression that intel drives would go into read-only mode after they fail, but after a quick research i found out that after a reboot they also brick themselves. that's irritating to tell you the truth.

 

[Breit]

Except that, afaik, the 950 Pro is NVMe only and 850 EVO is AHCI only. A distinction that may be with a us for a few more years, until NVMe becomes ubiquitous.

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.

Yeah, thats right, but the 950 is a totally different drive than the 850. Comparing apples to oranges doesn't help here. The 950 is a PCIe SSD, whereas the 850 is a SATA drive.
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: http://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...

 

[RejZoR]

Thats exactly what happens with intel drive

""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.""

I understand this as "they go into read-only mode" and when you power cycle them, they "brick" themselves (not readable anymore). That's what I understand under "bricked". So, what is the chance you are not going to try to restart the system when read only phase happens? Not exactly useful. That "brick" part just doesn't mean to me like they simply stay in Read-Only mode. I even remember them talking about drives being visible in BIOS but not bootable or not even that.

 

[RejZoR]

This is not always true: The Samsung 850 EVO 1TB features the exact same controller as the Samsung 850PRO (Samsung MEX controller), which is also used on all the smaller 850 PROs. The Samsung 850 EVO 2TB and 4TB variants also uses the same controller as the 850 PRO 2TB (Samsung MHX).
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.

The RAM capacity is proportional to the capacity since it needs so much memory for management of the NAND writes and reads.

 

[Breit]

The RAM capacity is proportional to the capacity since it needs so much memory for management of the NAND writes and reads.

True. But the controller has to support the needed amount of RAM to track all LBAs, so thats why there are different versions of those controllers.

 

[bug]

Yeah, thats right, but the 950 is a totally different drive than the 850. Comparing apples to oranges doesn't help here. The 950 is a PCIe SSD, whereas the 850 is a SATA drive.
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: http://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...

Well, that kind of ends the argument. Whatever performance advantage the Pro has over EVO is due to the use of MLC, not because it employs NVMe.
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.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Wonder how the price will stack up against the SM961, which I was originally planning on buying.

Samsung SM961 512GB = 198€
vs
Intel 600P 512GB = 195€

→ The SM961 is the much better bargain.

The Intel 600P is only €145 locally where I live, whereas Samsung drives are not only hard to find, but also highly overpriced, so it comes down to some other factors as to what is a bargain, no?

 

[D007]

Man, I'm so out of the loop..lol.. Since when did SSD's plug into the PCIE 3.0? That's sweet!

 

[Dethroy]

The Intel 600P is only €145 locally where I live, whereas Samsung drives are not only hard to find, but also highly overpriced, so it comes down to some other factors as to what is a bargain, no?

It's always been this way. Hardware prices will vary greatly depending on region. Just wanted to highlight, that one cannot simply state that the Intel 600P is "unbeatably cheap".

 

[bug]

Man, I'm so out of the loop..lol.. Since when did SSD's plug into the PCIE 3.0? That's sweet!

I think they've plugged into PCIe long before M.2 was invented. Man, you're so out of the loop...

 

[medi01]

via Imgflip Meme Generator

 

[$ReaPeR$]

via Imgflip Meme Generator

LOL