Samsung's latest hard drive the 950 Pro SSD is the fastest consumer SSD its ever made.
By
incorporating V-NAND and NVMe technology (that's Non-Volatile Memory Host
Controller Interface for the non-acronym crowd), the 950 Pro can offer
sequential read speeds of up to 2,500 MB/s and sequential write speeds as fast
as 1,500 MB/s.
That's
hellishly good, more than four times the read speed of its predecessor, the 850
Pro, and three times the write speed. It even beats Samsung's previous top
performer, the OEM-only SM951, in terms of read speed.
The 950 Pro
will be available in retailers this October, with prices for the 256GB version
starting at $199.99, and $349.99 for the 512GB model.
As Ars Technica
points out, the 950 Pro's performance is thanks in part to Samsung's use of
NVMe rather than AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) technology. Many
SSDs still used the older AHCI standard, designed by Intel in 2004 for
traditional, spinning hard drives, and this hobbles performance on low latency
NAND chips.
The 950 Pro
also uses the newer M.2 form factor (otherwise known as a "gumstick"
because of its shape and size), and PCIe rather than a SATA interface.
Essentially,
Samsung is throwing pretty much all the latest tech into the 950 Pro, making it
a flagship product to be reckoned with. In the context of the revival we're
seeing of PC gaming and Intel's new, powerful Skylake chips, the specialist
home computer is putting on some serious muscle when it comes to performance.
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