Samsung has revealed the world's fastest consumer SSD and its professional-targeted counterpart, the 960 EVO and 960 Pro respectively.
These are NVMe M.2 SSDs which use V-NAND – vertical NAND, meaning the chips are stacked on top of each other to enable better capacity and performance – and they certainly up Samsung's game on both of those fronts.
The 960 EVO will be available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB models (there won't be a smaller 128GB version as was previously rumoured), with the 960 Pro pushing storage limits further – it will be out in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB flavours. As Samsung notes, the latter will be the highest capacity (commercially) available drive when it comes to M.2 NVMe SSDs.
TurboWrite technology
As for the core specs, the 960 EVO sports Samsung's new Intelligent TurboWrite tech to help boost sequential reads and writes, which can hit up to 3,200MB/s and 1,900MB/s respectively. The SSD's random read speed is rated at up to 380,000 IOPS and random writes at up to 360,000 IOPS.
You also get 'dynamic thermal guard' technology to help prevent any danger of overheating, and a three-year warranty (or up to 400TB of data written, for the 1TB drive).
As for the Samsung 960 Pro, that offers even nippier sequential read speeds of up to 3,500MB/s and writes of up to 2,100MB/s. On the warranty front, this one is covered for five years or up to 1200TB written (that's for the maximum 2TB capacity SSD).
Both of these drives will be out next month, pitched at a suggested retail price starting at $130 (around £100, AU$170) for the base model of the 960 EVO, and $330 (around £255, AU$440) for the smallest capacity 960 Pro.
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