+R Shinn - I couldn't agree more. The 1TB SSD's/NVMes's are finally becoming more affordable, but they are still quite expensive. When I bought my 400GB Intel 750 NVMe, it was about a dollar per Gigabyte, I remember Linus making a video he got the same one in 1.2TB and it cost over a GRAND at the time. Now days they are half that or so. But the 2TB and up are just way way overpriced. It just sucks, because having an SSD is great, but STILL needing that mechanical HDD to store things, at times defeats the purpose. I have a 5TB mechanical HDD and it's almost full, so when I buy an 8TB or 10TB to replace it I'll have to transfer everything which will take hours... But I can't wait until I can say that I have a 5TB SSD almost full, and need to upgrade.
Ehh dunno guys. This m.2 drive is damn fast, but comparing it ONLY to an HDD(!) really tells this is just sponsored content. I would've really liked comparisons to other SSDs or NVMe drives
yeah, wish I could see how it compares to 850 evo ssd. I didn't run any benchmarks while I had that drive, but I upgraded to the 960 m.2 and didn't notice much difference.
Ecactly, he should compare NVME to SSD not to spining drives, this is just wrong, we all know that spinning drives are slow becuase all the videos on UA-cam compared SSD's to HDD's.
+HardwareCanucks, just some constructive criticism. When you were talking about NVMe maximum speeds, it said that NVMe supports speeds up to 32GB/s. The actual value is 32Gb/s (gigaBITS not gigaBYTES), which is an 8x difference. The Samsung 960 Pro is already quite close to this threshold at 28Gb/s read, but it seems like there is a huge amount of performance advantage that can still be gained based on this miscommunication.
I purchased the Samsung 960 EVO on 11/23/2016, and it is truly fantastic. I was using a Cruicial SSD for the OS before the 960 EVO. I get 15 second boot times with Windows 10, and Photoshop opens in about 8 seconds! The experience is CRISP.
Yeah I was a bit shocked anyone would still be using a hdd for their main windows drive, and 50seconds how on earth did he get that, my standard Samsung EVO SSD takes more like 10-15 seconds, the new NVME drive which I have ordered for my new build should dramatically reduce this time.
"and 50seconds how on earth did he get that" Yeah, weird... my "old" 500GB 850 EVO gets to the desktop with all background stuff loaded and systray populated in less than 20 seconds. Granted, I'm not loading any 3rd party anti-virus or firewall nonsense.
As an owner of an 970 NVME I will be brutally honest. Bottleneck is in the CPU and software at this point. You will notice little difference is most applications. Uncompressed large amounts of data you can see a big difference. Boot and launching in 98% of applications in the same. Install and Uninstall you will see a huge difference. Bar instantly completes. Copies and reads from one drive to another will be limited by the drive writing. For the most part you will not see the benefit, but in rare cases you can. It may be worth it if you are willing to pay 50-75% more for the driver currently, but probably not.
NVME on some boards takes longer initial boot due to initialization of the hardware. On my firmware/hardware etc, my system boots in 10 seconds, but my original 850 did it in 12.
everybody talked about the fasted mvme drives, but man, your video is spot on.such a pleasure to watch. your calmness,the step by step, the lack of hype, amazing content.
I've been using my X99 Motherboard for 4-5 years now and I'm excited to try out my first 250 GB M.2 NVMe 970 Evo I bought from Samsung. Your guide is very useful sir! Thumbs up!
are you telling us you were using a Harddrive as a bootdrive? In 2017? I've been using S-ATA SSDs for at least 3 Years now and I was not an early adopter. And you really should make a fresh Windows install when upgrading from an HDD so an SSD. Windows handles it differently and it will show how fast it is with a clean installation. And then test it against SATA SSDs. I wanna now if it's worth upgrading from a SATA SSd to an NVMe one. That the SSD is faster than your 4 TB HDD really isn't interesting at all because everybody knows it at this point.
Also, read/write speeds (read in particular, write more on large files) on spinning disks go down as capacity goes up. I'm starting to look at RAIDing my existing drives instead of replacing them, since that would be cheaper...
There are performance comparisons out there for NVMe vs. SATA. Some show negligible game load time increases, others show some improvement. I would say don't bother replacing your SATA before their lifespan is up unless you are desperate for any performance gain. Building a new system, go NVMe.
I am also using an HDD as bootdrive. I can wait 7 more seconds for my computer to start, and SSD are really expensive for their capacity. A 128 Gb SSD is 50 bucks, and so is a 1 Tb HDD.
i had a 850 evo as a boot drive for a while. it was only 120gb since it was pretty pricey back when i bought it. was tired of juggling files around and said fuck it and bought the 960 250 gb. didn't run any benchmarks, so i cant say if there is a difference, but i didn't notice one.
R Shinn You won't notice a difference on your everyday usage, however if you transfer big sized files that's where the benefits of nvme will become immediately apparent.
Man u just taught me what differences were in PCIe and NvME. PCs are so addictive, great video. Running a 512GB 960 Pro for my OS and programs on the new 8700k computer
I only use an SSD for the OS drive, and keep my files on a NAS. These solid state drives have proven to be too unreliable to be trusted yet for important data.
I ordered an 8700k and a 512GB 960 pro yesterday. Upgrading from my ancient I5 4690k. Didn’t have enough to get a new video card so I’m going to run with my 980ti until the new cards drop. Hopefully it will still turn out to be a lot better than what I had. I haven’t seen/herd of anyone with the same setup as I was going with. How do you guys like it?
I know this is a little older video, but I'm surprised that you didn't have one of these before August of last year. I swear by mine. I've been running some form of M.2 drive for almost 2 years now. I started with the 850 EVO M.2 and it was an obsession since then. I had a SM951 M.2 NVMe for a little while. Now I have a 960 EVO M.2 NVMe. The EVO is a nice drive saving a little money and still getting most of the performance and all the features that I need. I considered the WD Black M.2 NVMe at the time, but I went with the tried and true Samsung.
If i weren't subscribed already i would have done it now. Been looking all over trying to figure out how to install this drive, everyone says alot of shit about things i have to do in the bios and it be never showed up, did this and it worked instantly. Thank you so much!
Thanks for putting this up, I had planned to install the software myself & called Samsung tech support to check & see that all the ducks would be in a row for the project... The tech support was so poor that I thought to have it done for $80.00... Now having seen this I see what I have in mind is doable by myself... Thank you so much...
If you're having issues cloning your C drive, you may have to turn bitlocker off first. You can turn bitlocker back on once the clone has completed. Great video!
I don't know if you forgot some boards like Z97, but I have a MSI Gaming 3 (Z97) and bought a Samsung 950 Pro. It works perfectly fine without any issues, and my boot went from near 2 minutes to about 16 seconds. I also see that some people are commenting about comparing it only to his old disk drive, but it's just about how he upgraded to a much faster storage solution. It was only to document how much of a leap it was. I don't think there was any shilling intended, as some of you believe.
A comparison against a SATA SSD would be more useful in my opinion. Because most people already know that a SSD is way faster then a HDD. But when they want to upgrade from a HDD to a SSD they are confused wether they should get a SATA or NVMe one. Of course the NVMe one is faster but it is more expensive as well.
I must say that I did upgrade the 960 from my previous SSD which was an Intel 510, it was not a choice I regret, but until now I didn't use the magician software... it's good to have found that.
You know, I looked up the price of these drives thinking they'd be prohibitively expensive (like most new shit on the market). But these are actually surprisingly affordable for the performance. I'm surprised. I'd actually seriously consider these considering what they bring to the table.
I think you'd have even better boot times and file transfers with a fresh install. Coming from a spinning disk to a solid state drive the spinning disk may have had fragmented files and other issues that slow down the ssd when cloned.
Not sure how he says it takes 50 seconds (maybe he did say 15 seconds or even 5 seconds) , to boot to desktop, it should hit the desktop in less then 10-15 seconds even if it's a 5 year old Install of Windows (my first gen i7 920 I can boot my system in less then 20 seconds witch incudes the bios bit and that's a normal ssd) my install of windows 7 is about 6 years old If he cloned the HDD to the ssd then there must be something halting the boot up process but it did not look like he skipped video on the recording (the 960 has like 300k iops, my ssd is 90k iops)
During booting, PCIE devices are the last to initialize, while SATA are the first. It's how Windows is coded, since traditionally SATA storage devices were what everyone had. It's faster to boot a SATA SSD, but for everything else, PCIE SSDs are faster...
I put 1TB 960 Pros in my Razer Blade and desktop. They're perfect. Desktop also has a 4TB HDD for mass storage, but unless you have a giant Steam library or something I think 1TB is fine for an OS and applications/games drive. You could always step up to the 2TB if need be.
Totally sponsored content, you can just tell. That doesn't change anything. It is still true, and it is still a more than valid recommendation. I have a 960 Evo as my boot drive, and it still amazes me how freakishly fast it is.
So, how fast is this compared to the much lower cost legendary 850 EVO? *ANYTHING* SSD is faster than a platter, this is common knowledge. I get that this is sponsored by Samsung, but their older drive is a far better cost to performance for gaming than this drive in any version of reality, not to mention the benefit of being SATA for heaps more older system upgrades, and comes in M.2 or 2.5" formats for convenience. Fast is great, but comparing a Bugatti Veyron to a Ford Windstar isn't exactly awe-inspiring.
Depends... if you are just a general PC user and like to surf the web, listen to music, watch videos... chances are more expensive NVMe SSDs wouldn't benefit you. If you are a content creator, video production type; basically you need the fastest reads/writes/iops to avoid any wasted time in such tasks. Seconds saved to a high production content creator can easily save you MANY hours or more over the course of just 1-year time... think about it. If you are using cheaper laptops / desktops and on a lower budget and do not need the NVMe speeds, then a M2 (with SATA speeds) or 2.5-inch SATA SSD will do just fine. For SSDs on the SATA speed specs (regardless of SATA Port vs M2 Slot) these tend to be very similar in pricing when of about the same model family; for example Samsung 860 EVO SATA vs the M2 versions; both are nearly same price when comparing price-per-capacity. 850 EVO/PRO are basically dead, the 860 replaced it.
I pre-ordered this exact drive about a year ago and was one of the first to receive it. The speed is unbelievable. I'm not sure why Eber's pc takes so long to start up though - mine is around 6 seconds with this drive and the latest Windows 10. Makes me question some of his other benchmarks.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that U.2 is also a standard connector. It was formerly called SFF-8639 and often used in server class systems, but now it has been renamed to be easier to remember.
This was very helpful, I would make sure that your drive is installed before one tries to download that driver. I had to reseat the drive to load the driver. Thank you for the help this is my first SSD and very happy.
How is comparing 960 Pro with a spinning drive even relevant? This helps almost nobody 'cuz anybody who got the money to spend on a 960 Pro definitely already have a normal SSD as boot drive. A better comparison would be between an 850 Pro and this 960 Pro so we can know if it really deserves the money for an upgrade from a top SATA SSD to a top NVME SSD.
Just to be clear for people checking out this video: nvme is great if you're doing a lot of large file transfers etc. If you're a gamer and you're already using a SSD, upgrading to nvme will make a negligible difference in load times etc, so the cost isn't worth it IMO. If you're coming from a hdd, then nvme (or SSD for that matter) is a huge upgrade regardless. I personally like nvme because no SATA cables. Just don't go from a ssd to nvme thinking your load times etc will be instant or perceptibly different than your current ssd in real world applications.
Comparing an NVME drive to an HDD has really no sense. Those drives should be compared to SATA6 SSDs and this is where you see that there is really no sense in upgrading to nvme. I have a 960 Pro and an 850 Pro and I see nearly no difference in real world usage between the two drives apart the fact that the Nvme one costs four times more the sata one.
It's not overkill. Ever since the Meltdown/Spectre patches, I've needed the 960 just to get the speeds I had before the patches. I use many small files. Which may be the problem.
The Z97 motherboards (e.g. GA Z97X Gaming 7) can have M.2 slots accommodating PCIex2 (i.e. two PCIE lanes), whereas all current board accommodate PCIex4, which most NVMe M.2 cards are. There are a few x2 cards available; I am quite happy with a Silicon Power A80 M.2 NVMe PCIex2 card. Not as fast as the x4 cards, but better than SATA-3 SSD. Note that on Z97, this M.2 sits on the chipset PCIe, not the CPU, so the 16 CPU lanes can be fully reserved for GPU cards. Worth recalling, because the Z97/i7-4790K combo is still a good performer (just replaced my Nehalem i5-760 of 2011 vintage and could still use my DDR-3 memory from it).
Have had a samsung sm951 in my pc since I built it recently (i5 6500 gtx 1060). Load every game faster than most other people, which is great for getting in warmup time in csgo, or making sure you don't desync in path of exile.
I added a 250GB 960 Evo NVMe drive to a budget FM2+ system that was previously running off of a WD 2TB drive after its previous SATA SSD failed. I did a clean W10 Pro install and it seems to have been worth it - boot time from UEFI initialization completion to desktop is about 5 seconds or so. I expect the Pro drives would be somewhat faster, and undoubtedly Intel or Ryzen chipsets would be quite a bit faster, but this is what I get from CrystalDiskMark on an A88X board with no Magician caching: Seq R/W: 1078MB / 1073MB 512k R/W: 991MB / 1217MB 4K R/W: 53MB / 126MB 4k(32) R/W: 267MB / 210MB
A Correction: If you are upgrading and have an Z97 motherboard check it for an M.2 as some do come with it. Although even if it does have one check you MoBo's specs. Your looking for the number of interfaces. I have a Gigabyte Black Edition that comes with 4 SATA 6/gbs and either 2 MORE SATA 6/gbs or 1 SATA Express or 1 M.2 pcie 2.0x2. Basically my installed M.2 takes up 2 slots. With out that compatible pcie2x2 I would have gone with a SATA ssd. The other alternative is what he stated regarding an adapter card as it's probably your fastest.
I'm definitely upgrading to this drive. I have a 256SSD that came with my computer. It's not the fastest SSD I've seen, but I'm mainly doing it for more capacity staying in the SSD family. This storage is amazing for the size and performance. My big debate now is whether to go a little cheaper and a hair slower 500GB EVO or just go for the 1TB Pro. I have plenty of platter storage drives, so this will just be for the OS and games. With the size of games, I'm leaning toward the 1TB just for longevity, before the next drive upgrade.
Thank you for a great video! I just bought one of these for my latest build and wanted to know how to transfer my windows installation. Looks like it's going to be pretty easy thanks to your instructions.
I installed a 960 evo using a pcle adaptor on a z97x mobo. Was getting 3500mb/s read no probs. But when using as bootdrive only getting 1400mb/s. Still 3x faster than 850 evo. Love it
I just put two 960 Evo NVMe M.2 SSDs in a Z270. The price is only slightly more than a sata 850 Evo and it's spec'd at 5X the speed. I paid WAY more for WD Raptors in RAID 0 in the days before SSDs came out. The price is worth if it you have a MB that will boot to M.2
Just wanted to mention that Gb and GB are not the same thing and you incorrectly labeled the Sata and PCIE speeds. They are in Gb, not GB. Divide Gb by 8 to get GB.
I think a better comparison would be between a conventional 2.5" SSD and and the PCIe M.2. We know that access time is going to be greatly slower with a mechanical drive, but real world differences between a conventional SSD and an M.2 drive is what most users are going to be moving between at this point. In fact, other than a few people outside of enthusiasts, I can't think of anyone I know that still uses a mechanical drive for their OS...
My dad wanted to by some cd’s for his friend’s birthday. The cd’s costed 20 euros but the company accidentaly send this samsung m.2 960 pro. Before that happened I never heard of these things so I’m really glad it happened
Indeed. My AsRock Z97M OC Formula accepts any NVME drive, it does not require pci-e adapter. It works 100% out of box and is bootable, my 1Tb 960 Pro works without any issues, but i have no idea if its fast as its supposed to be (PCI-E 2.0 x2 mode) but i suspect around 900MB/s read 850MB/s write its being bottlenecked by M.2 PCI-E 2.0 x2 interface.
On the form: clear video, real full HD, perfect sound! Bravo. On the subject: i bought a new motherboard, cpu, memory and this SSD. I plan to put my old ssd on this new system, to boot on it and update drivers, then install the new SSD NVMe and clone the older SSD on it. Do you thing that will work?
I really enjoyed the video that you made. I thought your video and sound production was perfect 👌 I thought you did a overall good job of communicating your points in a informative way. However, I just want to state for the record that you have incorrectly stated the data transfer rate in one of your charts. You wrote it as GB/s which is Gigabytes instead of Gb/s which is Gigabits. No offense but this is a pretty big mistake as it is the foundation of everything you are talking about in this video. I think you should make at least an edit that states your error so people who watch this video in the future will not be misled or incorrectly taught. Thanks for the video!
Also it has the VT-X, VT-D an AES_NI instructions sets so its make a great PFSense router for routing at 1GB line speeds with SSL encrypted VPN. Its also great for low end IO/Passthrough with a hypervisor!
Of course portraying NVME SSDs from the game loading times perspective (compared to a HDD) is going to yield significant results. I have not seen enough of a difference between NVME and SATA SSD loading times to really justify upgrading just for gaming. Awesome for large file transfer and other uses, though.
I was upgrading to M.2 SSD about 1 month ago. The whole upgrade and clonning process was matter of few minutes. I choose EVO rather than PRO. I think the extra write speed is not worth the extra money. Short time i was thinking about buying 2 and set it to RAID0, but it would be a real speed overkill :-D
I have the 960 Pro (512GB) and it's such an amazing drive! I really wish that I could use the nvme drive format for all of my systems, but I don't have the capability with my server board or my work laptop.
Comparing an NVMe drive to a mechanical drive in 2017 is a bit naughty. It would be better to compare this with traditional SATA SSDs that everyone's been using since 2012 or so. I'm receiving a 960 Evo tomorrow btw :)
Let's put it this way: m.2 = no cables
That's a win in my book
Night-Star Productions agreed. That's the biggest selling point for me actually.
My last build was so disappointing with no cables to route... My PS is literally just using the MB, CPU and video card power cables!
So.. Cables = Poor people :D
i know, man. can't wait for the time when multi tb m.2's are affordable. cleans things up to much.
+R Shinn - I couldn't agree more. The 1TB SSD's/NVMes's are finally becoming more affordable, but they are still quite expensive. When I bought my 400GB Intel 750 NVMe, it was about a dollar per Gigabyte, I remember Linus making a video he got the same one in 1.2TB and it cost over a GRAND at the time. Now days they are half that or so. But the 2TB and up are just way way overpriced. It just sucks, because having an SSD is great, but STILL needing that mechanical HDD to store things, at times defeats the purpose. I have a 5TB mechanical HDD and it's almost full, so when I buy an 8TB or 10TB to replace it I'll have to transfer everything which will take hours... But I can't wait until I can say that I have a 5TB SSD almost full, and need to upgrade.
The 960 PRO might be the fastest, but the 960 EVO is probably the smarter buy.
price/performance ratio is way better with the evo
Droplight Tech .
1TB 960 EVO is the smarter buy.
Unfortunately, only the PRO version comes with a 2TB capacity
acidchaos1 3:20 it says 512GB, and if I remember correctly they offer a 1TB version too, not just a 2TB model only
Thanks for the vid! I am actually currently looking at one of these right now on another screen deciding whether or not to put it in my new build
Ehh dunno guys. This m.2 drive is damn fast, but comparing it ONLY to an HDD(!) really tells this is just sponsored content. I would've really liked comparisons to other SSDs or NVMe drives
CaptainKaba this just in, a horse can run faster than a sheep!
Well, he's not wrong, it is indeed a sponsored video
Then check this unsponsored result: i.imgur.com/r3HsF1y.jpg
960 EVO HD compared to other drives including an SSD.
An normal 2.5" sata ssd is still a huge upgrade over a HDD and is nowhere nears as much in terms of $/gb
yeah, wish I could see how it compares to 850 evo ssd. I didn't run any benchmarks while I had that drive, but I upgraded to the 960 m.2 and didn't notice much difference.
HDD vs SSD? Unfair comparison....
NVME vs SSD for one...
exTerEX Sata 3 vs Nvme
For fucks sake... Exactly!! Not that there are no such comparisons on the internet but good damn???!!!!!!
How do you know it's an unfair comparison without comparing them?
Ecactly, he should compare NVME to SSD not to spining drives, this is just wrong, we all know that spinning drives are slow becuase all the videos on UA-cam compared SSD's to HDD's.
+HardwareCanucks, just some constructive criticism.
When you were talking about NVMe maximum speeds, it said that NVMe supports speeds up to 32GB/s. The actual value is 32Gb/s (gigaBITS not gigaBYTES), which is an 8x difference.
The Samsung 960 Pro is already quite close to this threshold at 28Gb/s read, but it seems like there is a huge amount of performance advantage that can still be gained based on this miscommunication.
I purchased the Samsung 960 EVO on 11/23/2016, and it is truly fantastic. I was using a Cruicial SSD for the OS before the 960 EVO. I get 15 second boot times with Windows 10, and Photoshop opens in about 8 seconds! The experience is CRISP.
A bit dissappointed that you didn't compare the M2 with an SATA SSD Drive. That's the more interesting question to me..!
Yeah I was a bit shocked anyone would still be using a hdd for their main windows drive, and 50seconds how on earth did he get that, my standard Samsung EVO SSD takes more like 10-15 seconds, the new NVME drive which I have ordered for my new build should dramatically reduce this time.
"and 50seconds how on earth did he get that"
Yeah, weird... my "old" 500GB 850 EVO gets to the desktop with all background stuff loaded and systray populated in less than 20 seconds. Granted, I'm not loading any 3rd party anti-virus or firewall nonsense.
That's funny, I just made the same comment about my 500G samsung 850 Evo taking much less time.
50 seconds doesn't really make any sense.
As an owner of an 970 NVME I will be brutally honest. Bottleneck is in the CPU and software at this point. You will notice little difference is most applications. Uncompressed large amounts of data you can see a big difference. Boot and launching in 98% of applications in the same. Install and Uninstall you will see a huge difference. Bar instantly completes. Copies and reads from one drive to another will be limited by the drive writing. For the most part you will not see the benefit, but in rare cases you can. It may be worth it if you are willing to pay 50-75% more for the driver currently, but probably not.
NVME on some boards takes longer initial boot due to initialization of the hardware. On my firmware/hardware etc, my system boots in 10 seconds, but my original 850 did it in 12.
NVMe SSDs are amazing. I can't get enough of them.
everybody talked about the fasted mvme drives, but man, your video is spot on.such a pleasure to watch.
your calmness,the step by step, the lack of hype, amazing content.
Installed the 960 Pro 1TB in my new RyZen build. Absolutely beautiful. Less than 10 minutes to transfer my 256 840 Pro data to my 960 Pro.
I've been using my X99 Motherboard for 4-5 years now and I'm excited to try out my first 250 GB M.2 NVMe 970 Evo I bought from Samsung.
Your guide is very useful sir! Thumbs up!
are you telling us you were using a Harddrive as a bootdrive? In 2017?
I've been using S-ATA SSDs for at least 3 Years now and I was not an early adopter. And you really should make a fresh Windows install when upgrading from an HDD so an SSD. Windows handles it differently and it will show how fast it is with a clean installation. And then test it against SATA SSDs. I wanna now if it's worth upgrading from a SATA SSd to an NVMe one.
That the SSD is faster than your 4 TB HDD really isn't interesting at all because everybody knows it at this point.
Also, read/write speeds (read in particular, write more on large files) on spinning disks go down as capacity goes up. I'm starting to look at RAIDing my existing drives instead of replacing them, since that would be cheaper...
There are performance comparisons out there for NVMe vs. SATA. Some show negligible game load time increases, others show some improvement. I would say don't bother replacing your SATA before their lifespan is up unless you are desperate for any performance gain. Building a new system, go NVMe.
I am also using an HDD as bootdrive. I can wait 7 more seconds for my computer to start, and SSD are really expensive for their capacity. A 128 Gb SSD is 50 bucks, and so is a 1 Tb HDD.
i had a 850 evo as a boot drive for a while. it was only 120gb since it was pretty pricey back when i bought it. was tired of juggling files around and said fuck it and bought the 960 250 gb. didn't run any benchmarks, so i cant say if there is a difference, but i didn't notice one.
R Shinn You won't notice a difference on your everyday usage, however if you transfer big sized files that's where the benefits of nvme will become immediately apparent.
Man u just taught me what differences were in PCIe and NvME. PCs are so addictive, great video. Running a 512GB 960 Pro for my OS and programs on the new 8700k computer
waiting for my 960 pro, also running 8700k with 1080 ti
you'll love it. I haven't had any problems. I'm using about 150GB of it for programs & an 850 EVO SSD for games and files
I only use an SSD for the OS drive, and keep my files on a NAS. These solid state drives have proven to be too unreliable to be trusted yet for important data.
My old intel SSD worked great over 5 years, running couple Samsung 850s now and this 960 PRO, I trust them.
I ordered an 8700k and a 512GB 960 pro yesterday. Upgrading from my ancient I5 4690k. Didn’t have enough to get a new video card so I’m going to run with my 980ti until the new cards drop. Hopefully it will still turn out to be a lot better than what I had. I haven’t seen/herd of anyone with the same setup as I was going with. How do you guys like it?
I have the M.2 960 EVO and it has totally won me over into the M.2 drive market. I won't even consider anything but M.2 as a boot drive anymore.
I know this is a little older video, but I'm surprised that you didn't have one of these before August of last year. I swear by mine. I've been running some form of M.2 drive for almost 2 years now. I started with the 850 EVO M.2 and it was an obsession since then. I had a SM951 M.2 NVMe for a little while. Now I have a 960 EVO M.2 NVMe. The EVO is a nice drive saving a little money and still getting most of the performance and all the features that I need. I considered the WD Black M.2 NVMe at the time, but I went with the tried and true Samsung.
If i weren't subscribed already i would have done it now. Been looking all over trying to figure out how to install this drive, everyone says alot of shit about things i have to do in the bios and it be never showed up, did this and it worked instantly. Thank you so much!
Thanks for putting this up, I had planned to install the software myself & called Samsung tech support to check & see that all the ducks would be in a row for the project... The tech support was so poor that I thought to have it done for $80.00... Now having seen this I see what I have in mind is doable by myself... Thank you so much...
If you're having issues cloning your C drive, you may have to turn bitlocker off first. You can turn bitlocker back on once the clone has completed. Great video!
You guys are my go-to's for hardware these days.
Keep up the great work.
To summarize the video: Sponsored by Samsung
You're welcome
I don't know if you forgot some boards like Z97, but I have a MSI Gaming 3 (Z97) and bought a Samsung 950 Pro. It works perfectly fine without any issues, and my boot went from near 2 minutes to about 16 seconds. I also see that some people are commenting about comparing it only to his old disk drive, but it's just about how he upgraded to a much faster storage solution. It was only to document how much of a leap it was. I don't think there was any shilling intended, as some of you believe.
A comparison against a SATA SSD would be more useful in my opinion. Because most people already know that a SSD is way faster then a HDD. But when they want to upgrade from a HDD to a SSD they are confused wether they should get a SATA or NVMe one. Of course the NVMe one is faster but it is more expensive as well.
I have a 2 TB 960 Pro divided into a 512 GB System Partition and a 1.5TB Apps/Games part.. It is just smashing fast.. worth every penny :)
I must say that I did upgrade the 960 from my previous SSD which was an Intel 510, it was not a choice I regret, but until now I didn't use the magician software... it's good to have found that.
I love your lighting and camera work!
I lucked out and bought a used m.2 960pro 512gb from Craigslist for $120. Best buy ever. No issues what so ever
You know, I looked up the price of these drives thinking they'd be prohibitively expensive (like most new shit on the market). But these are actually surprisingly affordable for the performance. I'm surprised. I'd actually seriously consider these considering what they bring to the table.
I've been waiting on this for a while and loved the review... Keep up the excellent work
Just bought one for my ThreadRipper build. Should go very well with ThreadRipper since both are extremely fast. Can't wait to test it.
Installing my new 970 as soon as your video ends!
you should have compared the m.2 to a normal 2.5 ssd (samsung 850 pro) that would be more interesting
i have a 256GB 840 pro and thinking of upgrading.. but this video doesn't help me in any way...
Big difference, just installed a 960 Evo 256GB from a 850 Pro
I think you'd have even better boot times and file transfers with a fresh install. Coming from a spinning disk to a solid state drive the spinning disk may have had fragmented files and other issues that slow down the ssd when cloned.
Just got one over the weekend for my C: drive. It is freaking crazy fast. I previously had a 850 evo and it blows that out of the water.
6:15 50 SECONDS?! Like my 850 EVO takes less then 22 seconds...
Not sure how he says it takes 50 seconds (maybe he did say 15 seconds or even 5 seconds) , to boot to desktop, it should hit the desktop in less then 10-15 seconds even if it's a 5 year old Install of Windows (my first gen i7 920 I can boot my system in less then 20 seconds witch incudes the bios bit and that's a normal ssd) my install of windows 7 is about 6 years old
If he cloned the HDD to the ssd then there must be something halting the boot up process but it did not look like he skipped video on the recording (the 960 has like 300k iops, my ssd is 90k iops)
I See Its probably because he was a lazy idiot and cloned the drive.
30 seconds? I have a cheap sata ssd and i boot in under 15 seconds
During booting, PCIE devices are the last to initialize, while SATA are the first. It's how Windows is coded, since traditionally SATA storage devices were what everyone had. It's faster to boot a SATA SSD, but for everything else, PCIE SSDs are faster...
I stopped it with typing my password as well :D #approximation
I put 1TB 960 Pros in my Razer Blade and desktop. They're perfect. Desktop also has a 4TB HDD for mass storage, but unless you have a giant Steam library or something I think 1TB is fine for an OS and applications/games drive. You could always step up to the 2TB if need be.
Totally sponsored content, you can just tell.
That doesn't change anything. It is still true, and it is still a more than valid recommendation.
I have a 960 Evo as my boot drive, and it still amazes me how freakishly fast it is.
So, how fast is this compared to the much lower cost legendary 850 EVO? *ANYTHING* SSD is faster than a platter, this is common knowledge. I get that this is sponsored by Samsung, but their older drive is a far better cost to performance for gaming than this drive in any version of reality, not to mention the benefit of being SATA for heaps more older system upgrades, and comes in M.2 or 2.5" formats for convenience.
Fast is great, but comparing a Bugatti Veyron to a Ford Windstar isn't exactly awe-inspiring.
Depends... if you are just a general PC user and like to surf the web, listen to music, watch videos... chances are more expensive NVMe SSDs wouldn't benefit you.
If you are a content creator, video production type; basically you need the fastest reads/writes/iops to avoid any wasted time in such tasks. Seconds saved to a high production content creator can easily save you MANY hours or more over the course of just 1-year time... think about it. If you are using cheaper laptops / desktops and on a lower budget and do not need the NVMe speeds, then a M2 (with SATA speeds) or 2.5-inch SATA SSD will do just fine. For SSDs on the SATA speed specs (regardless of SATA Port vs M2 Slot) these tend to be very similar in pricing when of about the same model family; for example Samsung 860 EVO SATA vs the M2 versions; both are nearly same price when comparing price-per-capacity. 850 EVO/PRO are basically dead, the 860 replaced it.
I pre-ordered this exact drive about a year ago and was one of the first to receive it. The speed is unbelievable. I'm not sure why Eber's pc takes so long to start up though - mine is around 6 seconds with this drive and the latest Windows 10. Makes me question some of his other benchmarks.
I've been using the 960 pro for over 6 months now... can't complain =]
I have had the 950Pro for about a year. It's fantastic. Wish I had the 960Pro
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that U.2 is also a standard connector. It was formerly called SFF-8639 and often used in server class systems, but now it has been renamed to be easier to remember.
Really nice that someone did a benchmark with 960 pro, is the IOPS the same with 512GB and 2TB verson?
This was very helpful, I would make sure that your drive is installed before one tries to download that driver. I had to reseat the drive to load the driver. Thank you for the help this is my first SSD and very happy.
How is comparing 960 Pro with a spinning drive even relevant? This helps almost nobody 'cuz anybody who got the money to spend on a 960 Pro definitely already have a normal SSD as boot drive. A better comparison would be between an 850 Pro and this 960 Pro so we can know if it really deserves the money for an upgrade from a top SATA SSD to a top NVME SSD.
This is a great video, mate! Information and details, excellent content. This drive is a sure choice for me in the coming upgrade
Thank you Eber this made things go flawlessly!
Just to be clear for people checking out this video: nvme is great if you're doing a lot of large file transfers etc. If you're a gamer and you're already using a SSD, upgrading to nvme will make a negligible difference in load times etc, so the cost isn't worth it IMO. If you're coming from a hdd, then nvme (or SSD for that matter) is a huge upgrade regardless. I personally like nvme because no SATA cables. Just don't go from a ssd to nvme thinking your load times etc will be instant or perceptibly different than your current ssd in real world applications.
Comparing an NVME drive to an HDD has really no sense. Those drives should be compared to SATA6 SSDs and this is where you see that there is really no sense in upgrading to nvme. I have a 960 Pro and an 850 Pro and I see nearly no difference in real world usage between the two drives apart the fact that the Nvme one costs four times more the sata one.
It's not overkill. Ever since the Meltdown/Spectre patches, I've needed the 960 just to get the speeds I had before the patches. I use many small files. Which may be the problem.
Fantastic review, with great info. Thanks much! I'm a gamer and pro game/VR dev, so this is gonna be a great addition to my new rig.
The Z97 motherboards (e.g. GA Z97X Gaming 7) can have M.2 slots accommodating PCIex2 (i.e. two PCIE lanes), whereas all current board accommodate PCIex4, which most NVMe M.2 cards are. There are a few x2 cards available; I am quite happy with a Silicon Power A80 M.2 NVMe PCIex2 card. Not as fast as the x4 cards, but better than SATA-3 SSD. Note that on Z97, this M.2 sits on the chipset PCIe, not the CPU, so the 16 CPU lanes can be fully reserved for GPU cards. Worth recalling, because the Z97/i7-4790K combo is still a good performer (just replaced my Nehalem i5-760 of 2011 vintage and could still use my DDR-3 memory from it).
Have had a samsung sm951 in my pc since I built it recently (i5 6500 gtx 1060). Load every game faster than most other people, which is great for getting in warmup time in csgo, or making sure you don't desync in path of exile.
I added a 250GB 960 Evo NVMe drive to a budget FM2+ system that was previously running off of a WD 2TB drive after its previous SATA SSD failed. I did a clean W10 Pro install and it seems to have been worth it - boot time from UEFI initialization completion to desktop is about 5 seconds or so.
I expect the Pro drives would be somewhat faster, and undoubtedly Intel or Ryzen chipsets would be quite a bit faster, but this is what I get from CrystalDiskMark on an A88X board with no Magician caching:
Seq R/W: 1078MB / 1073MB
512k R/W: 991MB / 1217MB
4K R/W: 53MB / 126MB
4k(32) R/W: 267MB / 210MB
A Correction: If you are upgrading and have an Z97 motherboard check it for an M.2 as some do come with it. Although even if it does have one check you MoBo's specs. Your looking for the number of interfaces. I have a Gigabyte Black Edition that comes with 4 SATA 6/gbs and either 2 MORE SATA 6/gbs or 1 SATA Express or 1 M.2 pcie 2.0x2. Basically my installed M.2 takes up 2 slots. With out that compatible pcie2x2 I would have gone with a SATA ssd.
The other alternative is what he stated regarding an adapter card as it's probably your fastest.
this video was one of the most succint and helpful videos out there. Thanks so much!
I'm definitely upgrading to this drive. I have a 256SSD that came with my computer. It's not the fastest SSD I've seen, but I'm mainly doing it for more capacity staying in the SSD family. This storage is amazing for the size and performance. My big debate now is whether to go a little cheaper and a hair slower 500GB EVO or just go for the 1TB Pro. I have plenty of platter storage drives, so this will just be for the OS and games. With the size of games, I'm leaning toward the 1TB just for longevity, before the next drive upgrade.
Awesome video! Cloning to my 960 right now :D
Thank you for a great video! I just bought one of these for my latest build and wanted to know how to transfer my windows installation. Looks like it's going to be pretty easy thanks to your instructions.
I followed the steps
and worked perfectly
thank you
samsung should sponsor you
you deserve a thumbs up man ! great and detailed video ! very very usefull !
i have the SSD Samsung 960 EVO 500GB M.2
and im very happy,excelente speed and no heat here with the Asus ROG Maximus X Hero Z370.
thxs samsung.
50 sec to boot to windows? have you configured something wrong here? Because I have the 960 Evo M.2 and it boots in 8-10 sec with me...
I installed a 960 evo using a pcle adaptor on a z97x mobo. Was getting 3500mb/s read no probs. But when using as bootdrive only getting 1400mb/s. Still 3x faster than 850 evo. Love it
I just put two 960 Evo NVMe M.2 SSDs in a Z270. The price is only slightly more than a sata 850 Evo and it's spec'd at 5X the speed. I paid WAY more for WD Raptors in RAID 0 in the days before SSDs came out. The price is worth if it you have a MB that will boot to M.2
Thank you for this video it gave me ALL the info I needed to install my new drive.
Samsung pro series are one of the best SSD's out there right now. EVO is also not bad at all.
Just wanted to mention that Gb and GB are not the same thing and you incorrectly labeled the Sata and PCIE speeds. They are in Gb, not GB. Divide Gb by 8 to get GB.
Excellent video thanks. I will be using the 960 Pro in my gaming build soon!
Thanks for the guide! I subscribed to your channel. Keep up the good work!
This was a HUGE help. Thanks so much for the video
I think a better comparison would be between a conventional 2.5" SSD and and the PCIe M.2. We know that access time is going to be greatly slower with a mechanical drive, but real world differences between a conventional SSD and an M.2 drive is what most users are going to be moving between at this point. In fact, other than a few people outside of enthusiasts, I can't think of anyone I know that still uses a mechanical drive for their OS...
My dad wanted to by some cd’s for his friend’s birthday. The cd’s costed 20 euros but the company accidentaly send this samsung m.2 960 pro. Before that happened I never heard of these things so I’m really glad it happened
2:30 A lot of Z97 don't require adapters and are compatible with M.2 NVME drives (a BIOS/UEFI upgrade is usually needed)
Ya I was going to say, my Z97 Asus Hero Vii accepts M.2 NVMe no problem.
The M.2 slot on your Z97 board likely maxes out at 10Gb/s. You won't reach full speeds with this drive without a PCIe to M.2 adapter
Indeed. My AsRock Z97M OC Formula accepts any NVME drive, it does not require pci-e adapter. It works 100% out of box and is bootable, my 1Tb 960 Pro works without any issues, but i have no idea if its fast as its supposed to be (PCI-E 2.0 x2 mode) but i suspect around 900MB/s read 850MB/s write its being bottlenecked by M.2 PCI-E 2.0 x2 interface.
This is true
M.2 will only give you 550mb/s. 1400mb/s with an adaptor as os bootdrive. Shy of 3500mb/s as an additional drive. Strange
You forgot to mention that the temperatures at full load. I think that for many viewers it will be a big surprise)
Have you ever posted a video on jumping through hoops (2.47) to make the NVMe bootable while using an adapter?
On the form: clear video, real full HD, perfect sound! Bravo.
On the subject: i bought a new motherboard, cpu, memory and this SSD. I plan to put my old ssd on this new system, to boot on it and update drivers, then install the new SSD NVMe and clone the older SSD on it. Do you thing that will work?
I really enjoyed the video that you made. I thought your video and sound production was perfect 👌 I thought you did a overall good job of communicating your points in a informative way. However, I just want to state for the record that you have incorrectly stated the data transfer rate in one of your charts. You wrote it as GB/s which is Gigabytes instead of Gb/s which is Gigabits. No offense but this is a pretty big mistake as it is the foundation of everything you are talking about in this video. I think you should make at least an edit that states your error so people who watch this video in the future will not be misled or incorrectly taught. Thanks for the video!
So excited. I've already doused my Macbook in petrol.
Older boards are best left to SATA since most will not boot from PCIE. Check your latest board bios to be sure.
More well done informative tech vids like this one!
Let me think of a joke...
Intel core atom
yes they suck xD
NepperBoon I have a laptop with intel atom. Let's just say you can't play tetris
IRowdy04 Yea my brother gave my mom a really crappy old laptop with an intel atom.It can barely run firefox or chrome. Thats why i made this joke lol
The newer avoton isnt half bad. I run 12 Windows Server 2016 VMs on one under ESXI....
Also it has the VT-X, VT-D an AES_NI instructions sets so its make a great PFSense router for routing at 1GB line speeds with SSL encrypted VPN. Its also great for low end IO/Passthrough with a hypervisor!
You will do a fresh install pretty soon... Good vid, keep it up!
your first install? wuttttt these aren't new
Chris Hummel but 850 Evos were way better value
The link to the comparison is not in the video description :o
Mr. monotone back at it again!
Great overview and very comprehensive.
Of course portraying NVME SSDs from the game loading times perspective (compared to a HDD) is going to yield significant results. I have not seen enough of a difference between NVME and SATA SSD loading times to really justify upgrading just for gaming. Awesome for large file transfer and other uses, though.
970 pro is right around the corner!
I was upgrading to M.2 SSD about 1 month ago. The whole upgrade and clonning process was matter of few minutes. I choose EVO rather than PRO. I think the extra write speed is not worth the extra money. Short time i was thinking about buying 2 and set it to RAID0, but it would be a real speed overkill :-D
You should also note that to boot from them, you need bios compatibility. On my z77 board I needed to modify the uefi to add support.
I have the 960 Pro (512GB) and it's such an amazing drive! I really wish that I could use the nvme drive format for all of my systems, but I don't have the capability with my server board or my work laptop.
Comparing an NVMe drive to a mechanical drive in 2017 is a bit naughty. It would be better to compare this with traditional SATA SSDs that everyone's been using since 2012 or so.
I'm receiving a 960 Evo tomorrow btw :)
Excelent video dude, you are a genius.
I have already planned for this...Awesome
You communicate well- so easy to understand. Thanks.
I always go with an m.2 and then a second hybrid drive like firecuda
I've never been so early for a tech vid before
Nice video, you explained very well, made easier to install the ssd with a hard drive as storage :)
thanks for showing the load times for games. that is very helpful.
Thank you for including the graphics project times.