Samsung SSD 960 Pro (512GB) Review
How fast do you need your storage to be, and how big is your budget? These are the two questions you need to ask yourself when shopping for cutting-edge storage here at the end of 2016. Unless you're truly cash-strapped and don't do much more than basic tasks, we'd strongly suggest stepping up to some sort of solid-state drive at this point on your desktop or laptop PC. With very good budget Serial ATA-based drives such as Crucial's MX300 delivering roughly five times the sequential speed of a spinning-platter hard drive and lightning-quick access times, there's little reason these days to hang around with the poor plebeians still spinning their slow, platter-based boot drives.
If you want even more speed than a SATA drive can deliver (SATA tops out around 550MB per second, due to the limitations of the aging SATA interface), and you have a desktop or laptop that supports it, you can drop in a drive that supports NVMe. NVMe is a new-ish drive protocol that replaces AHCI, a softwa...
Samsung's new NVMe SSD outruns the pack, with sequential speeds up to 3,500MB per second and capacities to 2TB. But a lack of optimized drivers at launch made measuring its true potential difficult, and with similar-spec, lower-cost drives promised soon, waiting before buying makes sense.
Fastest consumer SSD available; Significantly speedier than previous-generation SSD 950 Pro; Available in capacities up to 2TB
Expensive; Shorter warranty than Samsung's premium SATA drives