At its SSD Global Summit, Samsung has announced a brand new flagship drive, called the 950 Pro, which is the company’s first M.2 form factor drive that’s built on the 32-layer 3D V-NAND architecture. That is seriously speedy.
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Samsung says that its new 950 Pro SSDs are up to four times faster than traditional SSDs, which use the older SATA interface. The 950 PRO goes one step further, however, using the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) specification. The compact M.2 2280 form factor ensures compatibility with next-generation desktop and mobile platforms that support the M.2 PCIe slot and interface.
Samsung’s new 256 GB 950 PRO solid-state drive weighs all of 10 gram. That is not much heavier than a credit card, though buying the card will mean it has to be swiped for $199.9 for the 256GB version and $349.99 for the 512GB version.
[Samsung via Ars Technica via Verge].
Speaking of M.2, the newly announced 950 Pro will also get a capacity bump in 2016.
A new market research study published by Transparency Market Research (TMR) suggests that the consumer SSD market will grow exponentially until at least 2022. There is also the M.2 version of the SSD 850 EVO, but that is a SATA/AHCI-based drive. This is essential for breaking through the SATA3 interface performance barrier, allowing for some truly blazing speeds.
The 950 Pro might be designed for clients and consumers, but Samsung has plans to quickly follow it up with a more enterprise-friendly model, the PM1725.
Un-Soo Kim, Senior VP of Branded Memory at Samsung Electronics’ Memory Business said: “With the introduction of the 950 PRO using NVMe and PCIe, Samsung is able to provide our customers with the memory needed to handle the increased storage demands of tomorrow’s computing systems”.
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Warranties cover you for five years, or 200 terabytes written (TBW) for the larger drive. The new SSD can run at a very impressive 300,000 random read IOPS, and can sustain random writes of 110,000 IOPS with sequential throughputs that should reach 2.5 GB/sec reads and 1.5 GB/sec for writes. While there is a standard Windows NVMe driver for Windows 7 and above, Samsung will be producing a propietary driver of its own for improved performance. However, Samsung is set to release at 1TB version of the drive with 48-layer third-generation V-NAND next year when the device is already ready and can cater more consumer drives.
