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Samsung Launches SSD 960 EVO NVMe Drive At 3GB/Sec and Under .50 Per Gigabyte (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: When Samsung announced the SSD 960 PRO and SSD 960 EVO NVMe drives a few months back, their specifications, which included transfer speeds in excess of 3.2GB/s, were among the fastest for consumer-class M.2-based Solid State Drives currently. Testing proved the SSD 960 Pro to be one of the fastest NVMe drives on the market, and like that drive, Samsung's just-launched SSD 960 EVO is packing the company's latest 5-core Polaris controller -- but it features lower cost 3rd-generation 3-bit MLC V-NAND flash memory and a newly revamped version of Samsung TurboWrite technology. Though the SSD 960 EVO family's pricing places it firmly in the mainstream segment for NVMe-based solid state drives, its performance still targets enthusiasts but with lower endurance ranging from 100-400 TBW (Terabytes Written), depending on capacity. The new Samsung SSD 960 EVO comes in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities and is still able to hit 3GB/sec in testing. Though it does trail the SSD 960 Pro in spots, it also drops in at a 15-20 percent lower price point.
TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP!!!
Most people have no use for drives like this. Can anyone justify why this matters to anyone other than a few dorks who have nothing better to spend their money on? I sincerely doubt anyone can explain why this matters, but I'll undoubtedly be modded (censored) troll so you people can avoid answering the question. This doesn't affect anyone's lives in a meaningful way, though most of you will pretend it does.
Er sorry, was that in bad taste?
I'm a bit surprised how fast SSD's replaced spinning hard drives. In my house hold, we have six computers, two servers and a bunch of appliances with storage.
Not a single spinning hard drive in sight.
Good riddance.
How full does it have to get before it explodes?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
.50 what? Dollars? If so, why not say so?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Why not use a real PCIE slot?
for suucessful lead developers The project BSD fanatics? I've You down. It was - Netcraft has effort to address of HIV and other may disturb other And committees
They were use to increase the speed under higher capacity and great technology all in under one Drive
.50AE? .50BMG? .50 Beowulf? Be specific.
bottom5 Butt. Wipe
Those endurance numbers seem pretty low to me. I seem to remember older SATA models surviving endurance tests close to a petabyte of writes. I think the drives themselves weren't rated for that, but they were also older MLC technology, too.
I have 4 850 Pro SATA drives used in two separate systems which use Server 2012r2 tiered storage and they're about 18 months old and have around 40 TB written to them now.
I wonder if the reduced endurance is just due to simply less underprovisioning at the flash level or if its the result of a process change to the flash construction that makes it weaker.
I was kind of hoping the MLC endurance had kind of passed some threshold where endurance wasn't really a factor anymore for all but the most intensive write applications.
Ahahah tx Samsung
I can't call that English
Who is posting corporate press releases as stories? What happened to product news being posted by real people who had actual experience with the product? This corporate whoring is bullshit.
I don't know what GP did, but you can put a bootloader called "grub" on a USB or SD card and tell it to boot Windows from some other drive. The BIOS/EFI boots grub, which is just a few kilobytes, then grub takes over. The grub entry looks something like:
menuentry "Windows" {
insmod chain
insmod ntfs
set root=(hd1,1)
chainloader +1
}
This is all well and good, and I'd love to put one in the desktop system. The shame is that fewer devices are shipping with M.2 slots anymore. I bought an Acer C720 Chromebook specifically because it does have such a slot, though it supports only SATA III and 2242 drives. What will this fit in other than a desktop? Small form factor boxes, yes, but otherwise... not much, in the future. And that's just a shame.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
It's nice to finally start seeing more motherboards with M.2/NGFF slots on the motherboard. So far most of the offerings have only one slot, and still sport way more SATA connectors than anyone needs. But I expect the offerings to get better through 2017.
Another thing to note is that there is a new 2.5" drive form factor... same dimensions as a 2.5" SATA drive, but with a different connector, which allows more substantial 2.5" form factor SSDs to use NVMe. There is also a new on-motherboard connector standard for the new 2.5" drive interfacing that makes use of a blocky SAS connector (but is not SAS... is PCIe for NVMe interconnect), and there are motherboards available now with one of these on them. And, again, in 2017 I fully expect motherboards to start coming out with more of these connectors.
In the mean time you can get standard PCIe cards that farm-out the correct connector for what you need (either the NGFF connector or the SAS connector). Please note that BIOSes for motherboards without native connectors probably do NOT support booting from NVMe, and if they do it will be UEFI booting only (no legacy booting from NVMe).
Just by way of information: M.2/NGFF is basically just a PCIe bus in a different format. It's a compact 4-lane PCIe bus format. However, there are *FOUR* different connector styles for M.2-style connectors, called by various names (M.2, NGFF, mSATA, mWIFI, and other crap). Be very careful to buy stuff that matches up. You want the NGFF connector (also known as M.2, but NGFF is the modern term for it and will be less confusing). This connector has one notch to one side and one hold-down screw at the end of the board along the center-line.
Another thing to be careful of is that a bunch of vendors have NGFF boards that are *NOT* NVMe. The boards actually have a SATA controller on-board and will attach via AHCI. Examples include Kingston HyperX and Plextor. All the Samsung products are NVMe.
For low-cost NVMe, another alternative to the 950 Pro is the somewhat older Samsung NVME SM951.
Most of these NGFF NVMe boards are capable of doing 3 GBytes/sec reading (deep queue). Writing will be a lot slower, even slower than a typical SATA SSD due to having fewer flash chips. Also, 3 GBytes/sec is if you plug it into a PCIe-v3 slot. Most machines out there today will have PCIe-v2 slots and performance will be more in the 1.5 GBytes/sec range. It is still fast as hell reading.
-Matt
Amfeltec in Canada has a PCIexpress carrier board capable of holding 4 M.2 sticks with a proper PLX PCIe switch.
http://amfeltec.com/squid-pci-express-carrier-boards-for-m-2-ssd-modules/?view=list
PCIe gen2 version allows a choice between x4/x8/x16 for the uplink, newer one is PCIe gen3 x8 or x16. If you run fully populated with 4 M.2 sticks at below x16 uplink though, you do end up sharing bandwidth between sticks due to the bottlenecked uplink, but unless you are doing something extreme, you probably won't notice, and you end up essentially running an internal PCIe expander inside your PC for not excessive prices (well, Avago is charging much more for PLX chips these days than they used to) compared to normal external PCIe expanders (which are fairly expensive) .
Also need to run some sort of software RAID to use at extreme performance. Windows 10 Storage Spaces now allows doing interesting stuff like using SSD's as accelerators for HDD software RAID as read caches (write too?), so having 4 M.2 sticks with two as a software RAID0 and the other 2 as accelerator SSD's for a 4xHDD software RAID10 is a lot easier now. Hell, it is possible (though obnoxious) to make Windows use it's own software RAID1 for the boot disk as well (need 10 Pro and do conventional mirror, not Storage Spaces, need to be real careful to properly copy all hidden partitions and doing the dynamic disk conversion after).
The following is the guide to do software mirror boot disk for windows 2012 but should apply.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/E/E/6EE26977-FAA0-41CC-8BDA-7A0C5E6EB9CC/Configuring%20Disk%20Mirroring%20for%20Windows%20Server%202012.docx