We've only just looked at the flagship model in the new Samsung 960 range, the Pro, and found it to be gobsmackingly good.

First and foremost, this drive is fast with near-advertised speeds (see story below for more details). The response time and consistency has been exceptional, and my cold boot time on Windows 10 after enabling several MSI boot optimizations is now 2 seconds flat. Still amazes me several weeks later.

Lightweight; fast; portable

gets hot quickly

Easy installation and setup. Very fast and noticeably faster than a SATA SSD. Quick boot times and program startups.

Noticeably faster than a SATA SSD Easy installation

$/GB is still higher than a regular SSD

I just received and installed yesterday on my 2016 ThinkPad X1 carbon, I also have installed the Samsung SSD driver. I felt it being very fast and I ran CrystalDiskMark, here is the result. It will take a long time to tell how reliable this drive is, but for now it is fast as advertised.

Samsung's EVO series has dominated the consumer SSD market for the past several years. The series has balanced performance and price, but NVMe is an industry-wide reset. Today we see if Samsung will dominate for another product generation. The Samsung 960 EVO is the mantle in the NVMe room.

Upper mainstream NVMe performance; Lower price than MLC NVMe SSDs; An eventual software package with new features; Future software package with new features; Better performance than the 250GB Model; An eventual software package with new features

Pricey; Low endurance; When will this ship; Power sucking driver; Limited initial release availability; Poor pricing against some MLC competitors; Low endurance and warranty; More expensive than MLC NVMe competitor; Low performance; Availability issues; Power sucking driver; Low endurance

Overall, this is a decent drive, certainly faster than any SATA based SSD where it matters. I am however a bit disappointed that the 250 GB version of this drive performs noticeably worse than the larger ones. "Coincidentally", there are very few reviews of the 250 GB version of this drive...

High apparent and burst performance

- Relatively high price; - Much slower than the larger versions; - Disappointing sustained performance

Best upgrade for money spent

Although the SATA III (6Gb/s) interface is not going away anytime soon (replaced perhaps although we've been listening to that for many years now) with its maximum throughput reached long ago it no longer represents a valid choice for professionals and enthusiasts.

- Excellent Build Quality; - Top Of The Charts Read & Write Performance; - 1.5 Million Hours MTBF / 400TBW; - Intelligent TurboWrite Technology; - M.2 / PCIe Solution; - 3 Years Warranty; - Up To 1TB Capacity

- Heat Buildup; - Price (For Some

Easy to install and noticeable quick in use, this is a good step up from a standard SSD.

The excellent power efficiency of Samsung SSDs is now a well known fact, and the 960 EVO is no exception, with the Samsung 960 EVO proving to be very energy efficient across all types of workloads, and perhaps even more importantly for a consumer grade SSD, it is also very efficient when idle and...