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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.
Bill?
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.
.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?
It's smaller. And probably lighter.
Remember the new motto in mobile devices is shove 10 pounds of shit features in a 5-ounce magnesium-infused-carbon-amazamantium case and make it thin enough to bend with a hard fart, in order to maximize revenue by minimizing longevity. Oh, and in Apples case, remove every useful external connection, because Fuck You, that's why.
I call it reverse marketing. You know, when manufacturers tell you what you need, and don't give a shit what you want.
If you want a real pcie slot they sell cards that put two nvme drives on them for absout 20 bucks.
They were use to increase the speed under higher capacity and great technology all in under one Drive
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.
Sure it is. It's a social media site that brings together potato enthusiasts around the world. Youtuber features recipes for French fries and stuffed skins, Irish history, and commentary detail on "The Martian."
Like hell it isn't. While I more or less live under a rock where game streamers and YouTubers are concerned, even I know that the top-earning ones make more than ten million bucks a year off ad revenue and whatnot.
That's certainly value for the Skatteverket, at the very least.
Everyone has a use for drives like this. Even grandmothers.
In fact, I installed an SSD for my elderly mom and she was shocked at how much faster and more pleasant her computer was to use. She couldn't believe all I'd done was copy her stuff to the new drive and install it.
An SSD matters more than a faster CPU or craploads of RAM to the average computer user.
> Oh, and in Apples case, remove every useful external connection, because Fuck You, that's why.
MUH AUDIO JACK HOW IM SUPPOSED TO LIVE WITHOUT A CABLE BETWEEN MY EARS AND MY PHONE PLEASE HELP IM BEING OPRESSED BY APPLE. ALSO $7 DONGLE FOR MY $2000 LAPTOP IS UNACEPTABLE!
And for the hipsters, shitty ear buds or bullshit "Beats" are an acceptable audio standard, wired or not.
For many others that prefer quality, a standard audio interface is preferred, and always delivered best when wired, especially when I don't have to worry about yet another fucking device that needs charging.
There's a difference between oppression and brainwashing. Enjoy your iLobotomy.
This.
Your PCs nonvolatile storage is one of the last things you can upgrade these days and notice a big difference in performance (the other being the GPU.)
I personally am still running an old sandy bridge i7 2600k CPU, and just hacked my UEFI to support booting to NVMe in order to use this ssd because it makes no sense to replace the motherboard/CPU/ram when they work perfectly fine.
Another fun thing about these is that there's no further use for drive bays, so you can totally gut them out and install two slow turning 240mm fans in the front of your case to make your PC silent.
Because full-speed M2 -> PCI-e cards are literally in the bargain bin price range as they pretty much just join the pins to the bus.
M2 works in laptops, other devices, and as a PCI-e with a cheap $10 adaptor. Hell, I've even seen some short M2 cards that fit inside a 2.5" drive adaptor to connect to SATA.
That's why.
George.
Ahahah tx Samsung
I can't call that English
just curious what mobo you have and how you got it to boot? I also have an old OC'd 2600k with no real incentive to upgrade, but am considering the 960EVO as a boot drive. I have an asus p67 pro but it doesn't look like it supports it out of the box. if you get this system up and running, i'm curious to see how it benchmarks on such old hardware vs the standards.
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 am interested too... How you done the bios hack?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
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
}
Why not use a real PCIE slot?
4-lane NVMe is faster than SATA, and eliminates the SATA cable and the drive power cable. It's a no-brainer for SFF systems and it's not unappealing for bigger ones, either. Taking SATA out of the equation reduces latency. I am currently using a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo SATA drive, but my mainboard has an NVMe slot and I'll be popping a 1TB NVMe in there just as soon as I see a price I like. It's just less wires to hang out in the case airflow collecting dust.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
An SSD matters more than a faster CPU or craploads of RAM to the average computer user.
The absolutely most important thing is to get up to a basic minimum amount of RAM, which is at least 2GB and more likely 4GB. It's pretty rare to see less any more but it does still happen, especially on Android devices... which, yes, really do need 2GB RAM. After that, storage speed is most important.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Try here: http://www.win-raid.com/t871f1...
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.
Yeah, sure, Bluetooth isn't good enough for you. You need the "real thing". A cable and a vinyl disk. Of course you aren't the hipster here because your smartphone doesn't have an apple. You are an individual, unique like a snowflake, unlike everybody else.
Sure.
The Loudness War is not imaginary, audio "masters" who overprocess the shit out of everything today isn't an illusion, and manufacturers still prefer to make hardware designed for listening to music with wires, and not use wireless products designed for making phone calls.
This is rather difficult to anyone to understand when the only audio world they've ever known is through ear buds and ripping off compressed shit from YouTube.
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
I have an Asus P8Z77-V Pro. What you have to do is insert the NVMe UEFI module into a bios image provided by your manufacturer (for i.e. bios updates.) If you do that, you don't need to do any kind of grub bootstrapping or anything like that.
Some motherboards normally won't flash a bios image that isn't signed (it's a safety feature,) and mine is one of those, so you have to take advantage of the failed flash recovery feature, in my case it was putting the bios image on a fat32 USB drive and pressing a button on the motherboard while the system powers on.
The URL somebody else posted outlines really well how all of this works, but the exact steps vary from motherboard to motherboard, and you can do it with almost any motherboard that supports PCI-e 2.0 or better (though you need 3.0 or better to take advantage of the speed offered by these SSDs.)
By the way, M.2 is literally just a small form factor PCI-e x4. Any adapter will work just as well as another, regardless of price, as it's basically just a shim. I paid $17 for mine on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d...
Hell, I've even seen some short M2 cards that fit inside a 2.5" drive adaptor to connect to SATA.
That's because M.2 can carry different things, not entirely unlike USB-C:
Computer bus interfaces provided through the M.2 connector are PCI Express 3.0 (up to four lanes), Serial ATA 3.0, and USB 3.0 (a single logical port for each of the latter two). It is up to the manufacturer of the M.2 host or device to select which interfaces are to be supported, depending on the desired level of host support and device type. The M.2 connector has different keying notches that denote various purposes and capabilities of M.2 hosts and modules, preventing plugging of M.2 modules into feature-incompatible host connectors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2
Some early or cheap M.2 SSD's use the SATA, the "proper" ones use PCIe (NVMe). Plugging a NVMe SSD into a M.2 slot which only has SATA (like that 2.5" adapter likely has) won't work.
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
Audio and video production... ;-D
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
Blistering performance, apparently.