10Nov Samsung 950 pro 512GB m.2 SSD, fastest SSD yet?
Over the last few years, SSD drives have advanced in leaps and bounds. We’ve gone from $300 for a 120GB glitchy Sandforce based SSD to 1TB SSD’s that saturate SATA bandwidth and now to the Samsung released the M.2 950 pro which is arguably the fastest consumer drive yet to hit the market.
At a price of $349, the 950 pro can handle sequential read speeds of up to 2.5GB/s and sequential writes of up to 1.5GB/s. Those speeds are more than double any standard SATA SSD and slightly better than Intel’s 750 drives in both price and performance.
On the downside, you’re going to need an M.2 slot that supports 2280 drives, if you don’t have that you could always fuss around with one of these adapter. If you’ve built a new system in the last few years, you might already have what you need. My mid tier Gigabyte LGA z97 board for example has a single PCIe m.2 slot that might soon have one of these installed.
When I look at a drive like this, I start to wonder what I would do with the speed. While it’s easy to arbitrarily say “give me more power”. I should probably take a closer look at what the bottlenecks are in my system before I start adding yet another SSD to the mix.
