Conclusion, Pricing, and Final Thoughts
Conclusion
PROS
- Best performing M.2 SSD Tested
- Best performing SSD Tested
- Highest available capacity in M.2 form factor
CONS
- Cost (the upcoming 960 EVO should help with that, though)
Pricing and Warranty
- 512GB – $329.99 ($0.64/GB)
- 1TB – $659.99 ($0.64/GB)
- 2TB – $1299.99 ($0.63/GB)
Warranty period is 5 years rated at 400 TBW for 512GB, 800 TBW for 1TB, and 1.2 PBW (yes, PetaBytes) for the 2TB model.
Final Thoughts
What better way to roll out a new test suite than with a product that dominates across the whole darn thing! The 960 PRO astounded us in nearly every metric – even some brand new metrics that we just implemented! In order to publish on time and with good results, we had to 'borrow' the 950 PRO driver to reach (and exceed) the stated specifications, but once we did, man is this thing fast! Nearly half a million IOPS and 3.3 GB/s reads / 2 GB/s writes from a tiny little M.2 2280 SSD. Man how far we have come in such a relatively short time!
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.