Samsung might offer some of the most popular solid-state drives (SSDs) available today, but to date it’s yet to release a 1 terabyte or more NVMe M.2 SSD. That’s all about to change. Starting next week, Samsung’s new range of SM961 drives will begin shipping out, and one of them hits the 1TB mark.
Built using Samsung’s own MLC V-NAND flash memory, twinned with the Samsung Polaris controller, these new drives should offer monster performance in a variety of sizes. Whether you opt for the 128GB version or the much larger 1TB edition, all of them are sporting huge read and write rates.
Both 128GB and 256GB options have sequential read speeds of 3,100MBps, while the larger 512GB and 1TB versions ratchet that up to 3,200MBps. Write speeds show that bigger is always better with SSDs, as the largest one offers a 1,800MBps sequential write, dropping to 1,700MBps for the half-a-gig version, followed by 1,400 MBps for the 256GB drive and 700Mbps for the 128GB.
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Samsung hasn’t released a price for the 128GB drive, so we’d expect that version to show up in original equipment manufacturer builds and laptops more often than not — especially since its specifications just aren’t as impressive as its bigger brothers.
All of them have 330,000 input-output operations per second (IOPS) for random reads, apart from the monster terabyte version, which jacks it up to 450,000 IOPS. From smallest to largest, the random write speeds are 170,000, 280,000, 300,000, and 320,000 IOPS.
Prices straight from Tom’s Guide research suggest that the 256GB version will weigh in at $160, making the 512GB version a more attractive buy at $280. The terabyte version offers the best value though, with a price tag of $512.
These drives should be big sellers. They offer ridiculous performance at prices far lower than industry standouts like the Intel 750 SSD. They should also operate far cooler, too, which will continue to aid this small-form-factor storage solution.
