2nd Fastest SSD Drive on the Planet

[Hugh_Effo]

I was looking to upgrade my SSD, when I came across this on Ebay
Samsung PM961 256Gb NVMe M.2. CCL computers was selling it for just £84.99 plus free delivery.

When I received it, Dropped it into the M.2 slot on my motherboard. booted into windows. Windows 10 loaded the drivers no issues, clone my current SSD Boot drive over to it. Rebooted and set the NVMe drive to boot in the bios. Job done in under 10 mins. !!!!

Windows 10 now boots so fast that by the time the monitor powers up, It's already displaying the windows 10 login screen.

Ran ATTO Benchmark, and OMG, read speed of 3,200MB's and Write Speeds of 1,400MB's
thats nearly 6 times faster read speed than my EVO 850 pro SSD. and it cost 2/3rds the price.

If you have a full M.2 Pcie X4 Gen 3 slot, then this is the SSD to get.
The only negative thing is that this is an OEM product so will not work with the Samsung Magician Software.

 

[Barty1884]

Glad to hear you're enjoying it. The PM961 is the OEM version of the upcoming 960Pro (an update/improvement on the 950Pro / PM951 OEM), so it's not surprising to see increased performance.

The price is quite amazing also - I'd be very surprised if the 'mainstream' 960 Pro is even remotely close to that price.

Out of curiosity, is there any early indication of temperatures being above average? Or throttling speeds?

 

[Hugh_Effo]

Not seeing any issues, but I have a well Ventilated Case (NZXT H440), which has Three corsair SP120's in the Front, 1 Corsair AF140 in the top (next to the 80mm AIO Water cooler), and another AF140 at the rear. Temps never seem to go above
35-45oC

 

[mcnumpty23]

and the sm961 is actually a little faster than the pm961 so you havent got the fastest one on the planet lol

the real benefit is when you have more than 1 of them file copying from one to the other is insanely fast

 

[Hugh_Effo]

Agreed the SM961 does have faster writes (1800MB's), but the same read speed (3200MB's) but is a lot more expensive, Scan has it on Pre-order for £137.99, thats £53.00 dearer than the PM961, for about 400MB's faster writes. If it makers anybody feel happier I'll change the title to "2nd fastest drive on the planet"

 

[mcnumpty23]

lol i wasnt being serious about it your title is fine

try as ssd benchmark atto tends to give higher results due to compressible/incompressible data

 

[mcnumpty23]

2nd fastest lol didnt have to change title but shows sense of humour

and yes thats a great price considering what a 950 pro costs never mind a 960 pro

i am stuck with my poor little sm951 lol

 

[mcnumpty23]

and if you want to test in as ssd as a comparison my sm951 gets

1915/1380

and total of 1460

though i have a ton of stuff on it so that might impact it a little

 

[Hugh_Effo]

Got 3100MB's Seq Read and 1250MB's Seq Write using the latest CrystalDiskMark.

I gather the reason some people are not getting the fastest performance is that some motherboards M.2 Slots are only running at Gen 2 speed.
The issues is going to be that pretty soon pcie SSD's are going to be bottlenecked like SATA SSD's are now, as pcie X4 Gen 3, has a theoretical throughput of 4GB's (1GB's per lane)

so until Pcie Gen 4 comes out, I think we will hit the limit fairly soon.

And don't feel so bad about your SM951, the first Hard drive made by IBM, IBM350, had a total storage of 3.75Mb's and a throughput of around 8Kb's

Makes you think the the new NVMe drives out now, were cloned from a chip pulled straight out of the navigational computer of the Crashed UFO in Roswell !!!