Samsung Electronics today announced the introduction of the Samsung 950 PRO solid state drive (SSD), created to meet the demands of high-performance consumer and business laptops and PCs.
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The 950 PRO SSD is the company’s first consumer ready SSD to use Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), an interface used mostly in enterprise systems.
Random read performance on the 512GB 950 Pro is up to 300K IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), with write speeds of up to 110K IOPS.
Although it has a smaller capacity than some of Samsung’s SATA SSDs, the 950 PRO won’t be left behind for long.
For any retrofitting, you’ll need an adapter as, thus far, only Skylake can take on the challenge of PCI-E VNAND. Last year, we launched the world’s first SSD 3D V-NAND technology to overcome limitations of traditional 2D SSD formats. Samsung has priced the 950 PRO SSD at $199.9 for 256GB and $349.9 will fetch you the 512GB model, available from October this year in India, where the drive is expected to be priced starting from Rs 14,000 (approx). But for those with machines that are capable, this seems like a bit of a no-brainer. Samsung really hopes that with its new products based on V-NAND, it will increase its market share. The random write IOPS difference is less; 90,000 for the 850 PRO compared with 110,000 for the 950 PRO. Built on a structure of PCIe 3.0 and using eight lanes sets this card up for a theoretical high maximum 8GB/s bandwidth. With these new SSDs, Samsung hopes it will move from the premium and corporate-level storage devices to the mainstream consumer market.
The new SSD module from Samsung is a 32-layer V-NAND and uses the NVMe protocol enabled by a new UBX controller. The 950 PRO changes that, making NVMe available to everyone.
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Samsung has announced its fastest mass-market SSD in the form of the 950 PRO, which will go on sale next month. Windows 10, 8.1 and 7 will be supported at launch time, with Windows Server and Linux added to the list in the future. The company also revealed that it will be launching the 850 PRO SATA SSD next year, based on this technology with up to 4 TB of storage. Both drives support AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption and the Dynamic Thermal Guard that can protect data in temperatures between 0 and 80 degrees Celsius.
