Xajel :
vern72 :
Why stray from the EVO / Pro designations? That's so handy to tell the difference between the consumer and pro versions.
I guess to make the name shorter, there's no meaning in having both words and number to name a product unless it was a pure marketing reason.
Darkbreeze :
tom10167 :
According to Newegg the 960 Pro is 3,500 Mbps/2,100 and 440,000/360,000... so this is slower?
This is my concern. If the performance is decreased from current models, what's the point?
The difference is TLC versus MLC. 960 Pro uses MLC. These 98x and 97x drives seem to use TLC (like 960 EVO).
If they're doing away with MLC, the old Pro/EVO nomenclature would just be misleading. Obviously Samsung doesn't want to actively remind people that these are all TLC drives by naming them all "EVO".
The upside here is that the performance at least seems to be *almost* as good as 960 Pro, only using cheaper components.
Everyone in the SSD business is always looking to cut costs of consumer products, so this seems to be what's happening here: Samsung instead of having two tiers of NVMe SSDs using MLC and TLC, has both using TLC - probably with different enough performance profiles. The 97x series may even have less parallellism, fewer controller channels, fewer PCIe lanes and/or less or no RAM (or a some combination of these) to have it double-duty as both the budget and low-power alternative.