Samsung 960 PRO NVMe M.2 512GB SSD

PROS:• Unbelievably fast read AND write speeds• Noticeable difference in program startup times• Easy physical install• Samsung Magician and Data Migration software are worth using• 5 year warrantyCONS:• Very expensive• Full performance may be limited on some systems or require workarounds to achieve max performance• Heat and power may be an issue for laptop systemsI love the size and speed of my card. Windows boots up from a restart in just a few seconds, it's fantastic. HOWEVER, be sure that your motherboard isn't a dud at supporting NVMe. I bought a $200 board from Gigabyte, a gaming board, that occasionally decides that it doesn't detect any NVMe drives. I re-flash the board, and suddenly it recognizes the drive and boots up like usual. I've got 2 M.2 slots and it behaved the same way on both. It can't be the card if a re-flash solves the issue.Moral of the story: be sure you've got solid NVMe support before buying.Used as ZFS ZIL/ARC on home file server and as primary disk for workstation. That SSD rocks, except that even Pro series have not so good endurance (only 400TB lifetime writes). Good enough - all I/O intensive workload is at ramdisk.So, perfect for workstations with optimized I/O.Can't recomment it for enterprise servers.For high workloads there are relatively cheap SAS3 (12Gb/s) SSDs with 5 WPD (5 full rewrites per day) and 5 years warranty - that is 0.5*5*365*5=4562 TB. And it's not a high-end SSD - high end SSDs have about 15 PB lifetime writes for half-TB drive (30+ times higher endurance and only 3 times more expensive than 960 Pro).

I was one of the folks that jumped into Solid State Drives (SSD) way back in the earliest days, and the M.2 "NvMe" devices (like this one) are the top-echelon of current SSD tech.NOT ALL MOTHERBOARDS have an M.2 connector, and NOT ALL M.2 connectors support the slower SATA M.2 speed PLUS the much faster NvMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) standard that this product uses. The slower SATA versions of this product are the Samsung 850 EVO or 850 PRO models. If you purchase an M.2 SATA unit, the only thing you gain over the old-school playing card shaped SATA SSD is you lose the SATA CONNECTORS AND CABLES for a cleaner build. But you buy SSD for SPEED, so the NvMe drive is the call. Also the PRO model versus EVO uses better technology to maximize speed, while the EVO uses a software workaround to 'emulate' the Pro model performance. The 960 Pro is PCIe bus connected and bypasses the much slower SATA bus. This results in a vast difference in data throughput speeds, in my case is TRIPLE the data speed. Some (not all) M.2 connectors can accommodate both types of M.2 drives, check with your system manufacturer to ensure compatibility.You get what you pay for... when speed matters THIS MODEL is definitely the call. The two photos attached to this review show the HUGE speed difference between a pci-e SSD (Drive C: in photo) and a SATA SSD (Drive D: in photo). The drives are C: drive Samsung 960 Pro NvMe Pci-e and D: drive Samsung 860 EVO conventional SATA notebook SSD. Photo on LEFT is high speed test results, photo on RIGHT is slower speed conventional notebook SSD results. Pictures worth 1,000 words?Edit: After installing, be sure to pop by Samung.com and download their free Magician Software which will auto update your FIRMWARE for the device if needed. My SATA Samsung SSD (the very nice 860 EVO did NOT require updating, but the 960 PRO (NVMe drive the subject of this review, BADLY needed a firmware update to resolve some squirrelly behavior which was happening when closing certain apps, but appears to be a dim memory post-firmware update. The firmware updated from within Windows 10 Creator's Edition using Samsung Magician software, very easy and intuitive.

Working perfectly several months later (just DO NOT update the firmware).I have it installed in a Linux system where it serves the dual role of root partition as well as VM backing storage for several heavily used VMs.It's so fast there's no way to tell that the drive is being shared, no VM pauses, no compiler slowdowns. The downside of all that speed, if you want to consider it a downside, is that I managed to eat through 1% of the drives rated lifetime (4TB of 400TBW) within 24 hours before stopping the poorly written process that was causing all the write traffic. Samsung drives are known for surviving well beyond their rated life, but that's also where the warranty ends, regardless of how long you've owned the drive, so be careful.The drive gets so hot it requires a heatsink, it's really not optional. Sure, it'll throttle itself to avoid overheating, but so would the main CPU if you left it in open air. Anything that makes this much heat needs a way to get rid of it, and SSDs tend to have shorter lives or die unexpectedly when the heat isn't properly handled.I bought some small pure copper heatsinks from Enzotech here (BMR-C1) and lined them up all the way down the entire stick, covering every chip, then I put a small fan inside the case positioned so that the airflow goes through the heatsink bars. It no longer throttles itself under load, and S.M.A.R.T. shows the temperature remaining well below the previous high points I was seeing, even when writing at the maximum speed.Note that there is a firmware update available that you absolutely do not want, the 3B6QCXP7 firmware has very serious problems and cannot be removed or reverted once the update is done. If you get a new stick with the 3B6QCXP7 firmware, you should return it immediately or contact Samsung customer support.