Introduction, Specifications and Packaging
This thing is ridiculously quick!
Introduction:
Just under a year ago we published our review of the Samsung 950 PRO, their first foray into NVMe SSD territory. Today we have a 960 PRO, which strives to be more revolutionary than evolutionary. There are some neat new features like 16-die packages and a Package-on-Package controller/DRAM design, all cooled by a copper heat spreading label! This new model promises to achieve some very impressive results, so without further delay, let's get to it!
Specifications:
Specs have not changed since the announcement. Highlights include
- A new 5-core Polaris controller (with one die solely dedicated to coordinating IO's to/from the host)
- 4-Landing Design – It's tough fitting four flash packages onto an M.2 2280 SSD, but Samsung has done it, thanks to the below feature.
- Package-on-Package – The controller and DRAM are stacked within the same package, saving space.
- Hexadecimal Die Packages – For the 960 Pro to reach 2TB of capacity, 16 48-layer MLC V-NAND packages must be present within each package. That's a lot of dies per package!
Packaging:
Nice touch with the felt pad on the bottom of the installation guide. This pad keeps the 960 Pro safely in place during shipment.
Perhaps fanciful, but i agree
Perhaps fanciful, but i agree it could be a killer app?
“Conclusion: we have now reached a new era
in which mass storage is capable of performing
at close to the same sequential performance
as volatile DDR3 DRAM. Four such M.2 SSDs
in RAID-0 mode == ~8TB (before formatting).”
My take on it would be a less ambitious 2 drive raid 0 of 512gm 960 ssds.Best performing and cheaper.
PCIe Gen 3.0 allows 1GB ps per lane, bidirectionally, so 2GB per lane theoretical max.
OR, 8GB ps for the 4 lane dual M.2 ports on moboS.
In theory thats sufficient to max out 2 raid 0 960 ssdS, but 3500MB ps sequential reads (writes are 2100MB), are of course unidirectional.
so in theory it seems raid 0 pair of 960s yields 4000MB sustained, read or write.
I am pretty sure we will see 8 lanes available to m.2 mobo sockets (even w/ bargain AMD Ryzen mobos & cpus (32 lanes BTW)), allowing 7000/4400 MB ps read write in theory, w/o fancy controllers.
I dunno the numbers for ram bandwidth. a lot better am sure. not sure thats a deal breaker for my argument.
point is, 7000/4400MB are numbers in a league of their own compared to anything before – even in the server world. Its a new paradigm for coders.
ok, using it for virtual memory isnt as fast as real memory, but shit its big. I dunno enough about architecture etc., but a TB of ram may open many possibilities for completely new approaches to old coding problems.
the killer benefit of ssdS was fast random access. It transformed our PCs.
~150MB ps sequential was livable, access times were the killer on HDDs performance.
As many have said re the 960, more of the same will be barely noticed by many.
give a gamer 1 TB of passable virtual memory, and apps which use it, then that could be revolutionary.
it bears repeating btw, that IOPS has shown even more stellar performance gains in the 960, and I imagine thats important for virtual memory. As we hear, many consider this the main reason to spend the extra for the 960 over the 950.
PS, upon reflection, poor
PS, upon reflection, poor mans raid 0 on 4 lanes is still attractive for swap/page files, even with little read speed gain. Write speed almost doubles from a theoretical 2200 MB ps to 4000MB ps.