Samsung announces 950 Pro SSD

Samsung introduced new solid state drives at its annual SSD Summit in Seoul. The 950 Pro series comes in m2 format and is controlled via the nvme protocol instead of sata. This would make the SSDs considerably faster than previous generations with a SATA interface.

The Samsung 950 Pro series consists of two drives: a 256GB version and a version with 512GB of storage capacity. Both versions come in the m2 form factor, which makes them suitable for laptops and newer generations of motherboards. The m2 drives have a pcie 3.0 x4 interface and support the nvme interface. The speed of the 512GB version is up to 2500MB/s for sequential reads and 1500MB/s for sequential writes. The number of iops for reading is 300,000 iops and for writing it is 110,000 iops.

The drives are built from nand chips produced with Samsung’s second-generation V-nand technology: those chips have 32 layers of V-nand and have a capacity of 128Gb. The controller is a new UBX controller, which supports aes256 encryption, among other things. The drives will be available from early October. The smaller drive will have a suggested retail price of $200 and the 512GB version will cost $350. This makes the prices slightly higher than SATA drives with ahci protocol. However, the nvme protocol was developed specifically for ssd and offers higher performance and better scalability. Previously, the company released the SM951 SSD, with a choice of ahci and nvme interface. Samsung promises a 5-year warranty on the drives, and the specified TBWs for the 256 and 512GB versions are 200 and 400 terabytes respectively.