Dynamic Thermal Guard:
When I reviewed the 950 PRO last year, I had some issues with heat. Even with basic benchmarks like CrystalDiskMark or ATTO, the drive's temperature would reach a point where its Dynamic Thermal Throttling (DTT) algorithm would kick in and reduce its performance. It got to a point where I needed to position an 8cm fan directly over the 950 PRO so that I could complete the tests.
I'm happy to say that the 960 PRO is much better at handling heat. Much of this is due to the drive's increased power efficiency. However, Samsung went one step further by incorporating a heat spreader into the label on the back of the 960 PRO.
At idle, the 960 PRO's temperature hovered between 39 ºC and 40 ºC. When pushed hard, these temps climbed up to 71 ºC where the drive's Dynamic Thermal Guard (DTG) technology was triggered, reducing performance. It took a lot to do this though. Looking at the screenshot below, you can see that more than 300GB worth of data was written before there was a major drop in performance. Even then, the 960 PRO still continued to write at more than 1,600 MB/s.
If you're going to push the 960 PRO hard and don't want DTG to activate, you may want to consider adding a cooling fan or attach a heatsink to the drive. With an 8cm fan blowing over the drive, I saw a dramatic drop in temps. At idle, the drive's temperature dropped down to 25 ºC and rose to 37 ºC under heavy workloads.
Final Thoughts:
The Samsung 960 PRO is one of, if not the, best consumer NVMe SSDs on the market today. Designed for professionals and enthusiasts, this M.2 form factor SSD is powered by Samsung's new 5-core Polaris controller and is available with up to 2TB of the company's 48-layer V-NAND flash. Combine this with a PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 interface with NVMe and you have an SSD capable of delivering some truly ludicrous performance. The 960 PRO screamed through our sequential transfer rate tests, reading at speeds as high as 3,570 MB/s and writing at more than 2,100 MB/s. The drive also took the top spot in our random write tests, producing more than 265,000 IOPS at low queue depths.
Impressive performance isn't the only thing the 960 PRO has to offer. To keep your data safe, the drive features AES 256-bit full disk encryption and is compatible with both the TCG Opal and IEEE 1667 specifications. The 960 PRO also supports the SATA Device Sleep (DEVSLP) standard which extends the battery life of a device by reducing the drive's power consumption when it's not in use. To top it all off, the 960 PRO is covered by a 5 year warranty with an endurance rating of up to 1.2 petabytes written (PBW) for the 2TB model.
As usual, performance and features like this don't come cheap. Prices on Amazon.com start at $330 for the 512GB version and go up to $1300 for the top of the line 2TB drive.
Highs:
- PCIe 3.0 x4 interface with NVMe protocol
- Equipped with V-NAND technology
- Available in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities
- Excellent sequential and random read and write speeds
- Performs equally well with compressible and incompressible data
- Small M.2 2280 form factor
- Large DRAM cache
- Supports TRIM and garbage collection
- AES 256-bit full disk encryption
- TCG Opal and IEEE 1667 compliant
- Works with Samsung's Magician software
- 5 year warranty
Lows:
- Pricey
