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Samsung appear a new family unit of ultra-high end SSDs today, dubbed the 950 Pro. This new drive family will debut by the stop of October at $199 for 256GB drives and $349 for the 512GB flavor. That'south a off-white increase over current 2.5-inch SSD models — the Samsung 850 Pro currently sells for $139 at NewEgg, while the 512GB season is $237. The 950 Pro's argument for its higher cost lies in stratospheric performance — upward to 2500MB/s read and 1500MB/s write.

Samsung has hit these performance figures while using the same Vertical NAND information technology deployed for last years 850 Pro. We've covered the company's 48-layer chips elsewhere, but that's not what information technology used for this new circular of drives.

Let's put those performance numbers in perspective, shall we? Back in 2009, Samsung partnered with WorldCyberGames to illustrate just how insanely fast an SSD RAID could exist. Put 24 2009-era MLC drives in a raid, and you know what y'all hit in terms of sequential operation? Around 2GB/s. Yes, that means Samsung is claiming its single 950 Pro is now faster than 24 drives were 6 years ago. Nosotros're living in the future, baby.

SSD_950_Pro

To striking these kinds of functioning levels, Samsung is using the newer NVMe interface as opposed to the older AHCI standard. AHCI was originally designed for spinning disks, and while it works with SSDs, it wasn't optimized for them. NVMe allows for ameliorate overall speed and, alongside an x4 PCIe iii.0 connexion courtesy of the One thousand.two drive standard (version 2280), will let Samsung hit performance levels standard SSDs tin't match.

There's no denying the sheer potential of a drive similar this, simply whether or non information technology'll make much difference in normal workloads is a very unlike question. To-appointment, high-cease SSDs tin offer pregnant improvements over SATA-based kin, only not always enough to justify their cost. It comes to workloads — the upgrade from an HDD to an SSD is far more impressive than the performance kick y'all'll get from SSD to SSD, even if you jump for a PCI-Express bulldoze every bit opposed to a conventional SATA port.

Then again, this is a ridiculously fast drive for a toll of but 68 cents per GB for the 512GB Samsung 950 Pro. It'due south difficult to argue with top-end functioning when fifty-fifty the premium drives aren't about every bit expensive as they were a few short years ago. Higher-capacity drives will still pack a huge premium, still — don't expect to be dropping a 16TB drive into a consumer system any time soon.