Product on Review: 960 EVO SSD
Manufacturer: Samsung
Street Price: 500GB: £250 GBP

The introduction of NVM Express has provided us with a worthy successor to the now aging SATA standard which traps users in a 550MB/s bottleneck. To some users SATA-based SSDs are still a valuable asset, but times are swiftly moving on. The humble mechanical drive is now being superseded by high capacity SATA-SSDs and a new kid on the block is taking over as the primary significant.

M.2 slots arrived with the X99 chipset and are now native to the Z170 chipset too, meaning that mainstream users can enjoy the benefits of NVM Express technology. NVMe uses lower latency and can handle up to 64K queues and up 64K commands each while SATA and AHCI can only handle 1 queue and 32 commands each – the benefits are clearly evident.

Soon after the 960 PRO release, Samsung are back with a cheaper alternative in the 960 EVO. Like its sibling the EVO uses Samsung’s new Polaris Controller and the companies 3rd generation V-NAND.

We’ve already seen the capabilities of the 960 PRO, can the EVO follow in its footsteps? Let’s find out.


Samsung on their 960 PRO