Description
For intensive workloads on PCs and workstations, the Samsung 970 EVO Plus delivers ultimate performance powered by Samsung’s NVMe SSD leadership. It is upgraded to be faster than the 970 EVO. It maximizes the potential of NVMe bandwidth for unbeatable computing that meets the needs of the most demanding tech enthusiasts and professionals. For performance that puts you in command, the 970 EVO Plus combines the next-gen PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 NVMe interface with the latest V-NAND technology to achieve fearless read/write speeds up to 3,500/3,300MB/s,* up to 53%** faster than the 970 EVO. Samsung’s advanced nickel-coated controller and heat spreader on the 970 EVO Plus enable superior heat dissipation. The Dynamic Thermal Guard automatically monitors and maintains optimal operating temperatures to minimize performance drops. Samsung Magician software will help you keep an eye on your drive. A suite of user-friendly tools helps keep your drive up to date, monitor drive health and speed, and even boost performance. *Performance may vary depending on SSD’s firmware version and system hardware & configuration. Performance measurements based on IOmeter 1.1.0. The write performances were measured with Intelligent TurboWrite technology being activated. The sequential write performances after Intelligent TurboWrite region are: 400 MB/s(250GB), 900 MB/s(500GB), 1,700 MB/s(1TB) and 1,750 MB/s(2TB). Test system configuration: Intel Core i7-7700K CPU @4.2GHz, DDR4 2400MHz 32GB, OS-Windows 10 Built 10240, Chipset–ASUS PRIME Z270-A. **Up to 53 percent performance increase for sequential write speed for 250GB version. ***TBW: Terabytes Written ****Warrantied TBW for 970 EVO Plus: 150 TBW for 250GB model, 300 TBW for 500GB model, 600 TBW for 1TB model, 1,200 TBW for 2TB model. 5-years or TBW, whichever comes first. For more information on the warranty, please find the enclosed warranty statement in the package.
Alex C. –
I would definitely recommend this product to others. If you are on the fence about whether or not to get an M.2 just do it. Youll be glad you did Fast, simple, and well worth it. If you can get two and get a RAID 0 setup for FAST speeds.
DrDoo –
An NVME SSD is very different from a normal SATA SSD. Its 3 times faster and with a very small footprint. I recommend you buy the retail version of the Samsung SSD so you will get the 3 year warranty and the Samsung Magician software. The OEM version doesnt have a software and the warranty is only one year. The software is important because it will help you upgrade the firmware.This is my second Samsung NVME SSD and I highly recommend them. The price difference from other brands is less than 10.
Jason D. –
I got the drive working fine on a old z77 chipset. Even after bios Nvme edits windows would still not recognize the drive and clean install prompted that i needed a driver. The install fix was to press shiftF10 at the install prompt. this opened a CMD prompt window then type Diskpart then type List disk… My disk was Disk 0 so then type Sel Disk 0. then type Detail Disk and low and behold…there it was. The 960 evo with details listed under dos. But wait theirs more. then type Convert GPT You should be able to stop here close diskpart and now see the drive Nativity after starting the windows install over. The bottom line is that the disk would not show in my old bios or windows until i initialized the disk and prepared it for use in UEFI by using Convert GPT in diskpart. Once i did all the problems are gone and the drive is amazing with no problems at all. After the drive was showing i decided to clone my two force gt ssd drives in raid 0 to this drive and my speed tripled. People with newer boards might not have this problem but im willing to bet those who are claiming DOA in reviews could have saved a return by running diskpart command and setting to GPT. I am using the SYBA M.2 PCIe To PCIe 3.0 x4 Card Model SIPEX40110 and am happy as can be now.
John S. –
With this drive it is difficult to come up with cons. I replaced a spinning drive with this and my laptop is truly responsive now. It boots in seconds, access to data is seemingly instant, and at 1 TB, I have all the storage I need in a portable system. The drive is vastly more expensive than the spinning drive it replaced, however, and that is the one downside. Im getting about 2600 MBs reads and 1800 writes, though, so there is that.
David W. –
Are you doing 4K video encoding Screen capturing lossless video Long After Effects projects Game development with folders full of hundreds of thousands of files Photoshop with gigantic images Buy this drive and enjoy the high life. Also, be sure to download the official driver… doubled performance of my drive.
Anonymous –
I was able to copy my 850 EVO to this at a sustained 430MBs which was clearly limited by the 850s read speed. Tested at 1400MBs write, 1640MBs for short bursts. I hope the price stays low on these. Got this one on sale for 140 Considering the fragile socketing of these, I can imagine someone breaking one of these during installation. Well see how long it lasts…
Glenn P. –
Pros Very Fast Price was not bad either.Cons Drive stopped working approximately after 2 weeks. Drive was installed in an Asus X99AII motherboard and was working without any problem until yesterday when my system failed to recognize the drive or boot. Purchased another identical drive today from a local computer store, installed and loaded Windows 10 and so far no problems. Only time will tell…
Anonymous –
Had this for a month and it worked fantastic, right up until it didnt. Monitored temps on the drive, never had it above 55C. Had to ship it to a NJ repair place Samsung provided the shipping. Still waiting on a repair status at this point.
James –
Pros Insanely quick boots to Windows in about 2 seconds. The Evo version of this drive is significantly cheaper than the Pro version, but still has most of the performance, so unless youre made of money is definitely the one to go forCons Still quite expensive compared to SATA SSDs, which to be fair still give decent performance. You need to check your motherboard has a M2 slot that supports NVMe, or an adaptor for a PCI express slot. Also to get the best from it make sure you have enough PCI lanes. If you only have a single graphics card though youll be fine
Master0382 –
I recently scraped my FX system, and built a Ryzen system. I opted for this drive after researching many NVME offerings. I am biased towards Samsung a bit, as I have used so many of their products, and they have been affordable, and reliable. The load times for games and applications is insane. I have used SSDs for several years, but Im still blown away with how well this drive performs. I cant recommend this enough.
Aeguss –
As the title says, this drive is fast and its cheap too when you look at the amount of performance you are receiving. I switched from this from EVO 740, and the difference is pretty significant when you compare the drives speeds on write and read along with the m.2 interface.If you are on the fence, definitely get this drive.Make sure that you motherboard supports m.2 PCI x4
Bradley G. –
Samsung, in its infinite wisdom, decided not to include the screw thats necessary to install an m.2 drive. No hardware store me carries a screw that small. Why they felt the need to save less than a penny on such an expensive part I dont know. Hopefully this review costs them at least a penny.
customexpressions –
I purchased this to replace my factory 128GB factory drive in my MacBook Air using a SinTech adaptor. The boot time is slightly faster not really noticeable. ReadWrite times are almost double and it sure is faster when transferring large GB files to and from the USB ports and also Downloading. Pros Samsung reliability Quick Warranty Cons Runs laptop 1012C warmer than factory drive Cant put laptop to sleep mode
skotsbox –
I upgraded from the 950 Pro NVMe M.2 256GB to the 960 EVO NVMe M.2 500GB so I could have room to dualboot Windows 7 and Windows 10. Not fully ready to make the switch to Windows 10. Even though I know Im going to have to at some point. So I thought I dualboot would be a good way to get acquainted with Windows 10. Decided to go with 960 EVO NVMe M.2 500GB because Ive never had a problem with the Samsung product. Superior technology at slightly under the average price per gigabyte.Ive read some bad reviews about this product but Im hoping that there just user error. Only time will tell but for now Im completely satisfied. Blazing speeds and superquick boots.
Barbara M. –
To get this to work with my MOBO ASUS ROG MAXIMUS VII HERO I did have to flash the BIOS. Remember to save your settings so you can easily reapply your overclocksetc once you confirm the system is stable. Guess who forgot to do this. Also, there is a setting in the BIOS you have to hunt down to enable your M.2 drive at all, and its not exactly obvious. Basically, and this may be the case for other mobos that introduced the M.2 socket, the third PCIe 4.0 slot is flexible. You have to find the setting to change that PCIe slot to M.2, because all of the other settings disable your M.2 drive. Once that is changed, your mobo will recognize your M.2 SSD and you can install Windows Samsung Magician software is apparently pointless to install if you have windows 10 theres no optimization feature, just a benchmark. It was phased out because it is no longer useful in Windows 10, though, so its not a con. This is why there is no disk with the drive. Remember to install Samsungs drivers to increase performance over the basic drivers.
Mocara –
Just wanted to get the speed for writing smaller files, rather than very large ones. Would need the PRO version for that.Excellent drive for ASUS ROG STRIX X99 motherboard. Detected right from the off, once the latest firmware was installed.
Ian H. –
These things run hot as all hll I think its just the design, probably not a problem in normal use, but if you run apps that place a massive load on the drive its probably going to fry itself. Either have a fan blowing over it, or even watercool it, because these little boogers get REALLY toasty. Ive only just got mine today Feb. 10., 2018 so I have no idea how long it will last before it conks out on me, as quite a few people have found with theirs. Hope Ill get lucky with mine, but only time will tell
Dustin S. –
I would say that if you are gaming you wont see much difference between this and a slower nvme. This thing boots windows faster than my board posts post is the longest part of the boot If you are doing big file transfers or video editing i would recommend you buy this drive. Even for my use in gaming it was worth the money over a regular ssd just for the windows load time
MagR –
I bought this to be the boot drive on a new build. I moved two 1TB SATA SSDs over from my old build which contain my games libraries and just move the game Im currently playing to this drive.The first thing I couldnt get over is how small it is. My first mechanical drive was 500GB and it was the size of a couple of sardine tins. This fits into a tiny M.2 slot under my graphics card and I hardly notice it.The drive feels very responsive. I benchmarked it using Samsungs own Magician software and it is close to the advertised speeds. My sequential read is over five times faster than my previous SSDs.However I dont really notice it being that much faster in practice. When booting it can only go as fast as the BIOS allows and then has to open my suite of start up apps before I can get to work.I have been monitoring the temperatures using Hardware Monitor and heat doesnt seem to be an issue. I am a water cooler so my case has low airflow and it doesnt cause the drive any problems.In conclusion this is a great product and I love its miniature size. However it doesnt really feel much faster than a conventional SSD. I suspect once you get past a certain speed these thing have diminishing returns.Hope this helps
David B. –
If you want to mount this drive in your M.2 slot, ensure that 1 You have your own mounting screw already since no screw comes with the SSD. 2 That your M.2 slot is properly wired for PCIe 3.0 X4. Dell XPS 8900 isnt. Magician software will tell you how many channels of PCIe are connected. I had to add a Lycom DT120 M.2 to PCIe 3.0 X4 plugin card for 18 because Dell screws up. But still a great deal. DO NOT use your SSD as your Windows swap device. You could eat it alive if you do a lot of swapping. Leave a rotating hard drive in your system for that. Or install enough RAM and eschew swapping altogether. Nobody tells you that when you clone your existing Windows 10 drive to your new SSD with the Samsung utility and likely others as well that it copies an internal serial number to the SSD and when you boot with your new SSD and your old hard drive both in the system because you want to use that hard drive for swapping and backup, that Windows will only recognize one of them likely the old drive. You only find this out by going to Windows Disk Management afterwards to find the error message on why both disks arent mounted. Installing Windows 10 fresh on your SSD will give it a new identifier, but do you really want to do that DO NOT tell Disk Management to force mount the other disk because it creates a new serial number in the process and renders that disk unbootable for Windows 10. If you want to keep both your new SSD and your original bootable Windows hard drive in the event of a future issue or its your only copy of Windows 10 I recommend just buying a new hard drive for swapping and backup from the SSD, as well as big slow additional storage for when you have more than the SSD holds and access speeds arent an issue, and put the original hard drive on the shelf. This way your system has a shiny new hard drive along with your new SSD and both should be good to go for years of service.
tacoindustry –
It is great and runs great. My notebook spin from samsung now boots in less than 10 seconds Meets performance from school work to military assignments. I only regret not buying a bigger capacity.
Paul –
Pros Wow. Bought a new gaming PC. Came with 1 TB HDD. Good value. Wanted to spec up myself. Bought M2 SSD. And re installed W10. So fast Love it Would recommend. Do your homework through as there are different M2 SSDs. I use it for my OS and games. 1TB for storage. Full boot to log on 10 sec.Cons Nothing really. Cheaper would be nice but as with all tec, as it becomes more popular price goes down.
Madison L. –
This is the best M.2 Drive on the market. Ive used a lot, this is simply the best. the pro series just offers additional readwrite. i couldnt notice a speed improvement even in bench marking on the same setup. I did not have bottleneck.
JAMES W. –
The Windows 10 install seemed to take roughly 3.5 minutes. Forgot to have a timer ready. Very easy to install on the motherboard. Just remember that with most motherboards, you will be losing access to at least one SATA port.
Brad P. –
I cant describe how fast this thing really is. This is my first M.2 drive, and coming from a SSD, its just a night and day difference. Wow is all I can say I highly recommend this if you want pure speed responsiveness…
Ricky K. –
I recommend, but if I could redo this part, I would probably end up getting a 2.5in. The speeds on this guy are outrageous, so much so that nothing I have can keep up with it. 2.5s are cheaper and the specs arent that different This is an excellent product
Jason B. –
If you have a NWME M.2 slot then hell yeah I would recommend this product. I have zero regrets besides maybe not going bigger… Hell… I wouldnt be be an American if I didnt want it bigger. So, Im going bigger boys. Im going bigger.
tdebug –
2,5 years as a system disk in a PC which used couple hours a day at best and the disk is completely dead with the windows 10 on it. Nothing indicated failing SSD prior all was fine, just before the day it is not visible to any system anymore.Great job Samsung my last product from you.
Aaron C. –
About 25 of the drives Ive bought over the years died within the first 3 months. So this isnt a huge surprise and I get that manufacturing defects are to be expected especially with brand new products. On the other hand, I have a platter drive used for storage that is still going strong at 5 years so it seems that some products are built to last more than others. Nonetheless, it was pretty disappointing and it made me go through the hassle of reinstalling Windows and getting everything set up back how I wanted it.
scarygary24 –
Brand new in Factory sealed box with an unbeatable price. Fastest hard drive on the market besides the 960 pro. Noticeable Improvement in game play and over all an incredibly pleasing pc experience.
Matthew M. –
Im not the most tech friendly guy, it did take some patience and time to figure this out. Its so worth it. You can set a path to download to your D drive old hd. In my case has 1tb. So my games thru steam I set the path to put the games there. They run flawlessly. I hope this helps someone.
Brenton –
This M.2 SSD is being used in an Asus Z270 build which fully utilizes the drives speed capabilities. I use it as a boot drive and keep any other high use apps on it. Other files like docs, music, vids, big programs like games go on a 2TB Segate Firecuda. so far I really like this setup. After my motherboard finished POST, the 960 Evo boots up Windows in like 56 seconds, and we are talking usable Windows, not the Windows screen where you sit for another minute or two waiting for stuff to start working Get the 500gb if you can afford it, if not this one still kills it. Incredible how far we have come with these machines.
Aaron V. –
On a whole, however, I wouldnt recommend installing your games on this drive as this would take up too much space for those who have large Steam game libraries. I bought extra regular SSDs to keep my other games on and Id recommend the same for everyone else. To be honest, all that really needs to be on these drives is the OS and some application installs like Photoshop, drawing and audio programs for those that need to work with large files and require Gigabytes of RAM as well as a fast drive. And I think the 250GB is more than enough for this as the 512GB and 1TB is really overkill unless you looking for bragging rights
Anonymous –
Samsung Magician is very polished SSD software for Windows users. Another plus, the drive has no trouble doing its own garbage collection outside of Windows and staying quick just like the 850 EVO, these make great local VMware storage.
4warddigression –
I use this for my OS and system applications, and I have never seen read write speeds at this level. Its astounding. I took one star off of design because while I have not had an issue with it, Thermal Throttling in high end desktops with heat is a very real risk with the M.2 drives. I really wish Samsung had provided some form of heat sink, or other cooling solution, luckily many of the new Motherboards coming out, are providing heat shieldsinks for M.2 drives. Oh i forgot to mention this thing is tiny. like smaller than laptop RAM tiny. If you are a performance junkie, or just need a new SSD. This is the way to go.
Anonymous –
Started out with less than expected performance 2600 seq read spec 3200. Write around 1600. Problem was as the days went by it got worse and worse and read speed dropping until under 400 and write speeds barely above 1000. Only two weeks installed and returned for a replacement from Amazon. Waiting the replacement to arrive and 3 stars to be adjusted if replacement performs as indicated. Hoping I just got a defective unit
britgeezer –
Bought 3 of these have installed 2 so far. The production folks of my ASUS MB are daft they tighten the M2 mounting screw so hard it was a pain to get off. Once installed and you realize it doesnt at first show up in your drives list, its plain sailing. For the 2nd install I removed the SATA data cable from the other HDs to force the OS to copy to the M2 SSD.
FuriousDave –
Heard a few issues with boards not detecting this to fresh install Windows on. Had no issues at all and its ridiculously quick.I recommend installing Samsung Magician as I achieved much better performance as opposed to the Windows supplied drivers.
ADAM V. –
This is my only storage drive in the computer so I put everything on it and it continues to impress. Great product from Samsung, and their Magician software is helpful to update the firmware and check status. Would recommend.
Matthew M. –
Had some issues installing Windows 10 on this drive. I wasnt using RUFUS but I was able to install using the DVD using the following technique 1. Begin the install 2. At the drive format screen if you use the default format button it will throw a GPT error during install 3. Press to open a cmd prompt 4. Type diskpart DISKPART list disk list all drives DISKPART select disk 0 in this example the target SSD is disk 0 DISKPART clean option for cleaning the selected drive disk from any previous data DISKPART convert gpt DISKPART exit exit from DiskPart exit exit from Command Prompt 5. Select the 960 and install as normal
Richard Z. –
There really isnt too much to say about this drive other than it is SCREAMING fast I have it installed in my M.2 slot on the PCIe x4 circuit and everything I do is loaded impressively fast. Adobe products such as Photoshop and Illustrator open within seconds of being clicked on. The computer boots in 3 to 5 seconds and is ready to use right away. 250GB is not a lot, but I only put Windows 10 and my Adobe products on that drive. The M.2 2280 slot is the default slot on my ASRock Extreme 6 Mobo so installation is easy. The ReadWrite speeds on this drive are towards the top tier and for the money is probably the best priced.
wdudek777 –
I have such SSD made in Korea and it is very good. This one is Chinese and I often freeze my computer and turn off when it reboots, it does not open windows. It just does not start, it just stands and waits, waits, waits, waits, waits, waits, and waits until I turn it off and on again. I do not recommend a good friend. It looks nice, its black and it has a red logo, but it scared me as I read that it was made in China. Only then did I understand what was going on and I sent that SSD back. They gave me money and Im happy.
Anonymous –
My steps taken to install after hardware installation and I dont know if all this is required or not but its how I got this working. Updated latest bios Downloaded windows media creation tool Have 32g usb 3 flash drive Downloaded win 10 64 bit in iso format Downloaded rufus Used rufus to create windows 10 installation for uefi for gpt partation Set bios to ahci Disabled secure boot Changed boot priority for the usb and installed windows, delete all partationsnot the random 128mb recovery partation or whatever was already on there so that you can create a new paration in windows installation process. It should say unallocated space and you create a new partition. After windows installation complete was able to go back to bios and change boot priority to the 960 evo. As a newbie this took me like 6 hours of playing with settings and doing research online, this is the reason for 4 eggs. Overall drive is fast and Im satisfied and havent got the heart to put back in my sata 1tb 5400 rpm hdd. I may just pick up a sata ssd instead, I dont think Ill ever want a mechanical drive again honestly. The 100tb endurance rating seems low but I guess well see how it holds up. I hope this was able to help someone.
Jeremy S. –
Super fast, easy to use, great value all around. Purchased as my OS drive, but just recently upgraded to a 500 Gig EVO Plus and made this one my secondary M.2. Love these drives.
Anonymous –
If I would of know the speed difference wouldnt be noticeable to the naked eye I would of gone with a 1tb ssd other brand for storage and kept my ocz for operating system. I honestly dont see, feel any difference with anything. If I were to time it side by side there might be few seconds load times but nothing youd notice on its own. Not 100 impressed. If I would do it over Id go a different route.
Tammy c. –
Cant recommend something that doesnt work. Cant even reorder a second one to try it out again as its sold out everywhereoverpriced from people trying to flip it. This really sucks as it was a gift for my friend and now he doesnt even have a working computer till I can find a replacement drive for him.
volgmant2 –
After using Samsung solid state drives in various other computers Ive owned and being very well pleased by the speed and performance of their 2.5inch form factor solid state drives, it was no question if I should consider buying one of their 960 Evo M.2 solid state drived once I found out that my new gaming laptop could support one. Ive got nothing bad to say about Samsungs storage products as theyve always offered me the speed and performance Ive come to expect in years prior.
Nickolaus F. –
That screw they give you to keep it in place is suuuper small, so be careful. Also, check your motherboard for exactly where your slot is and what lanes it will use. Some boards have slots that end up hidden behind video cards, and other boards share lanes with other PCI slots.
Anonymous –
I thought buying this product would increase my daytoday performance as well as loading games, I was wrong. This product is great for someone moving from a hard drive to an SSD platform, but a poor upgrade for someone who already has an SSD driven system. Diminishing returns definitely plays a strong role here .
cybersnypa –
I love this drive. I had a 512 gb stock Samsung unit in my laptop and it failed after 1 year. I replaced it with this one because the price for such a quality item is so good. The warranty was also amazing. If I had realized it was the PRO version that had the 5 year warranty I probably would have bought that one. But the speeds on the EVO are plenty. I bought one of these a few months ago for my gaming PC build as well. The 256gb seems bare minimum but at an affordable price and the 1tb is just too expensive.
abikeslider –
. The box was opened and taped back up. It had a big F in black marker on the side. At first my computer did not recognize it, but after cleaning the contacts and reseating it it worked as advertised.
Anonymous –
so Im running these ssds in a RAID 0 on a gigabyte z170 7 motherboard. after some head scratching I was able to get both of these in a RAID 0 as a bootable drive and install Windows 10. when I was in the home screen after I installed all the uptodate drivers I noticed that PC froze I simply hit the reset button on my case and from there I was not even able for some time to access the BIOS my motherboard was giving me in a0 error which means IDE initialization started. I physically have to take both of the SSDs out of my system to even have the motherboard post. at this point I am going to RMA these ssds once I get new ones I will conduct the same procedures to install Windows as I did before. obviously if that doesnt work I will RMA my motherboard either way I will report back an update the review as needed. the only thing I could think of, is the SSDs overheating when I initially uninstalled the ssds they were still warm to the touch this was over 1 hour after the incident. I have a GTX 1070 on water and several fans circulating air. so I doubt foreign heat or not enough airflow is an issue.
Michael G. –
I bought the 250GB version of this drive back when the preorder price was 125.99. Its really nice, but I dont think I would have payed over 200 for it with the Crucial MX300 available for 90. Also, I havent run any official speed tests on this thing. I have it plugged into a M.2 Socket 3 and Im very satisfied with it.
DENIS N. –
This drive is awesome to say the least. Very fast, mere seconds for booting in windows. Just great that is such a compact design. Samsungs migration software is the best
Vialli –
I was a little nervous as reading forums people were having problems with Asus Prime X370 Pro..I set this up with no problems at all using Samsungs Data Migration..Unplug all other drive except the one to be copied, start PC and SDM software wait until finished, switch off plug in all other drives and restart..This is a fast drive, my PC still starts in about the same time but programmes load faster now, my old drive was a Samsung 840 pro ssd..Speeds are now making the old drive look slow, which it isntFantastic drive, easy to fit, very fast, Samsung quality..
Anthony J –
Doesnt get any better than this. The fastest M.2 drive you can buy right now without going to a higher capacity. I use it for windows, and the applications. Games and media are stored on a regular Samsung SSD drive.The speeds are out of this world Theres no competing with Samsung.
Marcus N. –
I contacted Samsung support to see about possible repair or credit towards another drive. Will update review when I hear back from them. Consider buying another drive with a longer warranty. Also consider running Samsung magician or similar monitoring software to possibly be warned if a drive is starting to fail.
Anonymous –
I put w10 on this, and am having to use it with a Gigabyte Gaming 5 and adapter card due to my Asus X99A 3.1 being in for repair. Im getting 3200 read but 1572 write on Crystal, and the Magician software shows 16201700, and it does not fully work with this new drive to show how much has been written to it or show the marks to show the speed limits of the drive. I did install the new NVMe driver which w7 needed to see the drive when I booted with my 950. When I get my Asus back Ill test it with that and use my 950 with the adapter. Edit I installed the NEW version of Magician 5.0 from their site. Letting the software update on its own only gave me v 4.9.7. Now it shows .5TB written, and the readwrite scores are WORSE. I dont trust their software to bench because it always gives low scores for some reason. But it works fine on my 840 and 750 EVO, just not these NVMe ones. 4.9.7 showed 2600 read 16001700 write but 5 shows 6581677. Crystal is 32001577. Like I said I will test when I get my X99A back. 5820, 64GB 2133.
lsmithix –
Incredible speed, endurance and reliability in the 960 evo. With all that comes a hefty price point, so knowing what you actually need it for makes it worth it or not worth it. As far as boot up time and large file transfers, Ive seen an improvement over the 850 evo ssd. While other tasks, there really isnt a significant or noticeable improvement over a traditional ssd. I would say its best used for your OS, so the 250gb 960 evo would be where value meets your performance needs.
Martin B. –
Ive had Samsung 840 Pro drives for years and they were rock solid. This 960 EVO died so quickly Im reconsidering ever trusting my data to Samsung again. Motherboard wouldnt boot anymore and the last thing I suspected was the SSD, but sadly I just lost a month of setting up my brand new computer… If you buy this at a steep discount, make sure its not for your system drive. SSD temperature was around 45C due to motherboard NVMe heatspreader, but apparently thats not enough to guarantee reliability.
Martin J. –
I probably would have gone five stars if it hadnt been for prior experience with a really good PCI based M.2. This drive is fast and is working well so far. Install time was quick. I did note one odd thing, in that it actually installed the System Reserved partition to an installed SSD rather than another partition on the M.2. IDK if this is something specific to this drive, a mess up , or what…never seen another drive do that, and could account for some of the latency I am taking a star off for.
Anonymous –
I didnt know if this would be worth the price, but Ive never seen load times like this before. I keep calling my wife into the room so she can see how freaking fast this is. She has been tolerant thus far. Will update if this changes.
MERCIADANOE B. –
Overall I am happy with its performance. I have not experienced some overheating issues with this drive so far I did make sure my pc built would be good cooling system. I might get an other one in the future for the other m.2 slot.
Anonymous –
Get this thing. You wont regret it I certainly do not. About the only thing that would make this better is if it has some cool cooling finsheatsink attached that match my setup and also give it a bit of passive cooling.
Lance M. –
Linux Mint 18.1 With Samsung M.2 960 Evo SSD. Asrock Z270M Extreme4 motherboard. i5660K. No problems installing with default live UEFI session and either default Ext4 files system or BTRFS set up 512Mb FAT32 flagged for bootesp with Gparted. Had to use newest version of Clonezilla to make a system image. Only problem was HDD Activity light flashing way excessively while surfing internet. I did research including calling Asrock and Samsung. Neither had heard of this. I tried it with Window 10 Home and had same behavior with Edge browser. I RMA it. I do not have this issue whatsoever with a very similar performing brand of M.2 SSD. A mystery.
Kristoffa87 –
I bought this for a new build gaming PC I made for my partner for christmas.I had never used this form of SSD before but had read good reviews.Super simple to install into the motherboard and one of the fastest windows installations I have ever seen.Windows now boots effortlessly before the screen even has time to warm up.
Anonymous –
I would absolutely recommend this drive. I did not think I would be able to discern the difference between the EVO and PRO versions, and I have certainly have not been disappointed in this drive. Once you go M.2, it is hard to go back to a regular old SSD.
Alan K. –
I regret buying it, because it is not faster than my RAID 10 SSD array. And I cannot RAID EVO 960 because I have only one M.2 slot to put it in. Slot is under motherboard and EVO 960 running hot. Idle is 52C, under load it reaches 70C. With these temps I am not sure it will work for more than a year. Now I have to worry about putting heatsinks on it, but still going to be hot. Comparing to my RAID 10 array of 512GB ssds, each of them are at 3540C under load. EVO 960 under that heat starting to throttle and drops speed to 500MBs or lower, while my RAID 10 array is 1800MBs RW under heavy load and OPS is much better than EVO 960. No more m.2 drives for now.
Robert F. –
This drive is VERY quick. I was going from a 60GB SATA 3 SSD for my system drive that JUST had Windows on it to this. I used to have time to go get a drink when I pushed the power button and how I barely have time to sit down and get comfortable. There is between 30 and 45 seconds difference at startup. Would recommend for anyone with a PCIe M.2 compatible MB.
Steven S. –
After I started installing Windows I happened to touch the disk surface. It was burning hot. So hot that I aborted the installation and put some heat sinks on the hot chip. Had to peel the plastic label off to stick on the sink. I have no idea how the manufacturer expects these drives to last more than an hour or two without a heat sink. Electronics CANNOT run that hot and last very long. Been working great for almost a month now. 6 or 8 hours a day. Heat sink gets pretty warm, but not hot.
Vuong T. –
You need to do researched before you buy this. Dont expect to plug n play. You have to mess around your bios a little bit for the motherboard to recognized and use it to install windows on it. For any of you complaining about the MISSING screw you are WRONG. Samsung know that every motherboard that support M.2 comes with at least 1 or 2 screws depending on how many M.2 slots on the board. They dont need to send the extra one. Go to your motherboard box and search for tiny little bag with the cap and screws in it and use it. Put the cap slot in first then screw. Dont use it without the cap slot because it will bend the fragile ssd down in an awkward position. Hope these information helps
oshibanaartist –
Works well and fast in my desktop PC. However, drivers were required to download from the official site and installed in order for the computer identified it. Once thats done Im happy with the item. Highly recommended.
Travis M. –
Recommend Yes, I would recommend this product. However, be aware 2.5 SSD drives are cheaper and in real world scenarios you probably wont use the extra speed a M.2 has to offer that often. Would I buy again Not at this price. Wait a few years for the price to drop unless you want a decluttered desktop beast now. Installation was very easy once I found a screw. The main reason I wanted to purchase this, was the save me a headache, as the placement of hard drives and the SATA ports in my desktop are in frustrating places. I wish everything had no wires. Cable management sucks. I managed to install the M.2 SSD in my desktop, completely clone my 2.5 500GB SSD onto the M.2 SSD, erase my 2.5 SSD and transfer all my games onto the 2.5 SSD in about 2 hours. I had absolutely no issues getting the M.2 to work. However, I did install Samsungs NVME driver. If the M.2 is in a computer without an OS and you want the M.2 to be the boot drive I highly recommend this, check around on the internet how to get M.2 drives to show up when installing Windows… This may be fixed now with Windows 10 installations, however I believe there were issues with Windows 7 8. If installing the M.2 in a computer with an OS already and you want this to be the secondary drive, make sure you go into Disk Management to format the drive.
selmorides –
I dont bench test or anything like that. I bought this based on reviews and reputation for making a good product. Im a novice and only know just enough to be dangerous. This was only my second build, the first one eight years ago. It came out great and boots really fast compared to what I had. Whether you choose a Samsung product or not, you must go with an SSD for your boot drive. For files and data, a good old HDD does just fine.
Joseph W. –
Very good drive. I love that it takes hardly any space, the transfer rates are great but for the average person and even most gamers NVMe isnt worth spending a lot more for over a SATA drive. But if you transfer VERY large files pretty often you can take advantage of that. If you see one on sale over all definitely worth it. but if you can get a much larger SATA SSD for the same price then you might want to check your work load to see if an NVMe would be beneficial over more space.
Limecat –
This tiny little speed demon lives under a nice sized removable heatspeader on my asus z370f mobo out of sight and works magic. Great for editing and video work and it came with a free copy of assassins creed origins to boot which is a nice addition for distractions from my workThe z370 bios has 0 issues from the get go of identifying it and using it as the boot drive also.
CarlosFandango –
I bought this card not expecting to see much increase over sata SSD but boy was i wrong, this thing is phenomena.I already had an 850 evo sata ssd and it already felt quick but loading games of this is massively faster, playing Assassins Creed Origins loads now in about 4 8 seconds when using fast travel, compared to 15 25 previously.Numbers dont seem a lot, but in reality it feels almost instant now.The only issue i had is when i first fitted it, my Asus X99 deluxe board wouldnt auto detect it as a Gen3 device, and set it to GEN 2 meaning i was getting half the speed i should have been getting, after 2 hours of diagnosing in the bios i had to manually set PCIe Slot 4 to GEN 3.. possibly a firmware bug.. reported to ASUS.
Randle F. –
Some of the more poor reviews seem to be about DOA disks, or just that it never worked. I personally have not had that problem at all. The disk showed up on the motherboard right away, and I have never installed Windows faster. I was blown away by the disk speed when utilizing CrystalDiskMark Im personally using this with a 1st gen Ryzen system, but it should work with any of the equivalent Intel CPUmobo combos out right now. As with all things Samsung, it is a bit pricey compared to other manufactures, but in the consumer SSD world, Samsung is right up there with the best. This drive did not disappoint me at all.
Tim G. –
Replaced a 500G Evo drive. The only gotcha I ran in to was transferring the data over to the new drive. I had to get a PCI card to house the old drive and put the new drive in its slot on the motherboard. Luckily, my motherboard came with that card so I didnt have to buy one.
Anonymous –
The physical installation is quite simple, look it up You can either clone your previous C drive, or do a fresh install more time consuming. I chose to clone. After the chip is installed, start comp normally and run Samsungs data migration software, porting your C drive Restart system and enter your bios Configure your bios to boot to the samsung ssd in boot settings and savereset After booting successfully, install the Samsung NVME driver You should then be good to go.
Anonymous –
I wont list this as a con but I cant actually update the M.2s firmware. Ive tried using Samsungs software and its not detecting the M.2 even though its in my UEFI and I know its working because Windows and all my other software is installed on it. Im not sure what hardwaresoftware is to blame here as I havent been able to figure it out from online searches. For anyone like me whos never seen an M.2 before prepare to have your mind blown at the size of these things. Theyre about as long as your house keys and probably thinner than them too.
Santo P. –
Installed in a ASRock Z170 Pro4 LGA 1151 motherboard with a i78700 CPU. No issue at all installing Windows 10 Pro. And my goodness, it is fast. It takes longer for the system to POST than it does to boot to Windows. The old Windows experience index run manually on Windows 10 Disk Sequential 64.0 Read 3067.88 MBs 9.2 Disk Random 16.0 Read 986.55 MBs 8.8
Steven R. –
Highly recommended for a new system build that has the NVMe M.2 slot to handle this. Got speeds of 3250 MBs1493 MBs RW with CrystalDiskMark. Pretty impressive for the money, so well worth the cost.
Said B. –
PLEASE BE AWARE I know that the crazy fast read and write speed for this price looks pleasing, but dont cheap out and get a 960 pro instead. Or at least get a data recovery service and extended 3rd party warranty. I would buy this again myself if it was in stock, but I would make a backup this time to at least prevent data loss.
Anonymous –
With benchmarks, its 56 times faster than my SSD but Im not getting the numbers other have been posting with the same drive. Doesnt matter but mostly for peace of mind. Installation was easy. If you have done any research on your own or simply googled nvme vs ssd, youll already know that real world load times for games and such arent really any better. Its still very nice, boot times are better, and I now have an SSD to load my games on while this loads my OS and apps.
patsandy100 –
I wasnt expecting it to be affected by my cpu overclock however be aware that bclk overclocking will have odd results with pcie ssds. I could not get full speed pcie with any adjustment to this value. Multiplier overclock works fine. Benchmarks higher then advertised. Cant fault it, expensive but still a lot faster then my current 860 evo. Highly recommend this for new builds. Not sure if I would upgrade specifically for the speed boost. I was in need of more ssd storage but I do not regret paying the premium for nvme. Also note, rapid mode is not a feature on these ssds. They are already fast enough without memory caching. Just something I didnt realise before I purchased.
Brandon R. –
If it has an M2 slot, dont go sata or reuse your old sata drive, make the switch One tip I found for those with UEFI and ultra fast boot option You must install Windows in UEFI mode for fast boot to work. follow these steps Before you start create yourself a Windows 10 install USB using the Media Creator, DVD might work but some boards can be picky about using DVD drives in UEFI mode so its best to create a USB. Also unplug any other hard drives except your Windows installation drive this is a one time step and on future reinstalls you can leave them plugged in. First go into your EUFI BIOS, find the CSM option and DISABLE it, while youre there also ENABLE Fast Boot Secure boot. Next boot from your USB drive Go through to the partition screen then press Shift F10 to open a command prompt Type Diskpart press enter Type Select Disk 0 press enter Type Clean press enter Type Convert GPT press enter Type Exit press enter and the close the command prompt Install Windows as normal Once its finished shut down the PC and reconnect your hard drives. For reinstalls in the future you can just boot from the USB drive and install, once UEFI mode is enabled it will stay enabled unless you manually disable it.
Porfirio T. –
I highly recommend this product to anyone who wants to be in the SSDs world and loves to have a fast boot up of Windows. I definitely would buy this product again. I would change the original packaging, its so fragile, you can fold it easily and damage your SSD.
Tina B. –
The marketplace business model provides new and exciting ways for the consumer to get serviced. I bought this drive from Newegg as they are an authorized reseller for this product, had a fair price, and have been in the past, past tense, no longer a reliable resource. This time around the component was sold by 3CExperts, a marketplace partner, who apparently sold me a drive from Australia. Four months later, when the drive is dead and in need of warranty replacement, Newegg is out past 30 days, Samsung USA is out SSD drives are region specific and must be warrantied from that region, and Samsung Australia is out we are not allowed to provide warranty services outside of Australia, Fail for the market place model, fail for 3CExpert, and giant fail for Newegg and Samsung who should not allow this type of scenario to occur in the first place. If I am going to have to deal with unreliable resellers and grey market equipment, I might as well purchase from Bezos and save a few dollars……….
Anonymous –
I had a Samsung sata drive and them added this. It is somewhat faster but not much. If you are going from a hard disk to this you will be blown away. If not, have low expectations and you will not be dissappointed.
DamienC –
I upgraded to this from a Western Digital 2.5 SSD, and the difference is simply stunning.Windows, Games, Spreadsheets etc all load so much faster.It was easy to install as well, and get Windows installed on it.I will eventually upgrade this to a 1TB or 2TB version but for now this will do.Highly recommended.
Rikki –
Never had a issue with Samsung. Im satisfied I can recommend their brand in any PC. I am using this 500GB module for my Game storage. Ensure your motherboard has a M.2 slot though.
A Google User –
AN AMAZING FAST SSD SUPERB QUALITY PAINLESS CLONE OF MY ORIGINAL WINDOWS 10 USING SAMSUNGS FREE SOFTWARE SAMSUNG DATA MIGRATION. WONDERFUL 5 STARS
Anonymous –
This product was expensive. I had hoped to purchase the 2TB version but had to choose the 1TB version due to the budget I had planned for this particular build. If I was building this PC again and had the choice, I would still purchase the 960 EVO drive as it is just that impressive.
Ronald M. –
I have only had this for a couple weeks, so I cannot speak to its durability. I saw another review here reporting a problem with a Ryzen motherboard. I installed this on an ASROCK AB350M Pro4 motherboard, equipped with BIOS 2.5, using Windows 10 as the OS. The installation and subsequent performance were trouble free. It is, of course, my boot drive.
mmmyers64 –
very good picture beautiful picture best ever use Nikon D3300 Camera . I get use to how do. Dont have Book about Nikon D3300 and No CD come with it. Take me for week try figure out. Now it easy use. Thank You Mike Myers
mark w. –
I am using mine as a scratch disk for now instead of a boot app drive, its made after effects scrubbing noticeably faster. I may still use it as a boot drive eventually. If anyone is wondering why they didnt provide an m2 screw, its because your motherboard provides it.
Longsider –
Bought this for my new build Ive never used one before, but I will from now on. Never had windows load as fast its just awsome and for the price its best bit of kit to buy for your PC. Can recommend this for anyone still thinking about getting one.
igarar2013 –
This is a great SSD, and boost PC performance to an incredible level. But if you plan to connect it with the PCI interface for maximun performance, check the compatibility of your BIOS with NVMe drives before purchasing. Mine was not fully compatible and I had to modify the BIOS to use it as explained in winraid post How to get full NVMe support for all Systems with an AMI UEFI BIOS After that I was able to make a clean install of Windows 10 the Samsung data migration tool was not able to make a bootable disk in my PC
PatT97 –
Failed after 2 weeks of installing and less that 10 times use. You might think I probably didnt have sensitive data on it since I only had it for a short time, however I had some of my 3D designs and projects worth more than 100 hours of work on it. Now I have to go through the return and replacement process for another 3 weeks.
JojoPat –
I upgraded my desktop PC a while ago and choose to buy 2 x Samsung 960 EVO. Putting both into MSI H270 m2 port, configure it for RAID0. I can copy paste 4.7GB ISO file in the drive in 2 seconds. What a breakthrough performance.
Joel G. –
5 stars in performancequality, but minus 2 stars for the poor packaging, and exposure to risks of damage in shipping. In a retail setting the packaging is probably fine as these devices would probably be under glass locked. In a shipping scenario however, the insufficient packaging led to the retail boxes being damaged in transit. Luckily I avoided any damage to the drives themselves, but with items at this price point and level of performance, I expected and should have received much more robust packaging from this third party vendor. As mentioned above,these drives were sold and shipped by 3C Expert, whom i blame for the poor packaging, not newegg.
ALAN R. –
Some mobos require a bios upgrade to load windows from USB to this SSD such as the Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7. Price per GB higher than some and not a cheap storage medium for bulk storage . Generally mechanical drives give warnings they are dying, these usually workor they dont . Always backupbackupbackup things
Joshua H. –
Highly recommended for anyone doing video editing with multiple, or high resolution videos, sound files, overlays, etc. Pricey, but worth it. I kept my Evo 500Gb Sata for games and I have about 20Tb of additional inmachine storage, but if youre looking at this drive, chances are this isnt going to be your only means of storage either. That being said, Id get this over a 500Gb Sata drive any day of the week. Your PC will FLY
ScubaSky –
It is truly a nice surprise to have a product actually perform better than advertised. 3,257 MB sequential read right out of the box. I havent even updated drivers or enabled rapid mode yet. Hopefully the total lifetime writes will live up to what is promised as well, but I couldnt be happier for now.While expensive, this drive is priced fairly for the performance boost it brings and worth every penny if RW speed is what you need. I loaded a clean install of Windows 10 Creators Update Build 15063.138 in under 5 minutes
plug44lab –
This is still cutting edge technology, best suited for a clean reinstall of your operating system. If, like I was, you are expecting to simply migrate the contents of existing drive C to the 960EVO beware, there is a lot of conflicting advice on the net and I tried several methods. Frustration got me in the end and a clean reinstall of Windows 10 was inevitable. Lost a serious amount of data in the process. Do your research well. Having said that, the speed of the drive is phenomenal and well worth the effort. Another word of warning never defragment this drive, its a sure way to ruin it.
undertle –
Samsung 960 EVO 250GB was another superb investment into my New rig, with a 210 performance i shouldnt complain, buy have seen it cheaper since my purchase, but at the time was the best value. Seamless installation into m21 port for maximum performance. If you dont buy this get the 960 pro, for greater longevity.
BCdP –
I have this for almost nearly 3 months now. Blazing and unprecedented performance on the previous laptop that Im using which is Lenovo T460s. Afterwards new laptop come Lenovo T470p which is 3 days ago and I decided to use the same NVme Samsung evo 960 m.2 1tb after clean installation of OS Windows 10 Pro and downloaded the recent driver from microsoft and lenovo website as well as samsung recent firwmware. After completely switchoff the device then I turnon again I was surprise the same day that it stuck on Lenovo logo Please see screenshot attached and it didnt load the OS at all. When I forcefully rebooted it goes to the normal state then OS loaded properly. Issue is keeps on happening everynow and then, a bit alarming I believe.
Dan L. –
From the research Ive done, loading times for games are pretty much identical from nvme to ssd. So you could probably save a few bucks and get a standard ssd. Dont get me wrong, this is a great product. Boots in about 20 seconds and a fully functional at that point. Great product.
brian h. –
There have been some concerning failure rates. So far it appears i have won the silicon lottery with this drive. If you do enough research in this price range, you will end up staring at this drive. Click buy, and enjoy
Anonymous –
I had a Samsung 470 256GB SATA SSD in my rig as the startup disk. I put this in my new Ryzen build and it is night and day different. Almost instantaneous wake from sleep or hibernate. Warm boot is a few seconds. Cold boot cant be more than 20 and most of that is POST config options I could chop down. This is absolutely bonkers fast. Loading everything is so fast it almost feels like RAM compared to my old drive. Put it this way upgrading to this from a SATA SSD was a larger jump than a SATA SSD was to my 7200 RPM performance HD. Could not be happier. Do it.
billmilosz –
These are fast and easy to use on modern systems. SMALL too Great C drive for a miniITX system. Plenty of room for Windows 1064 and a handful of programs along with some documents. If you are going to store a lot of pictures or video or have A TON of software youll need additional storage cloud or maybe a regular HDD.
Ian A. –
Honestly, in real world performance, I cant tell the difference between this and my SSD. but I needed more space and why not grab this. I keep my OS and some games on it. no issues at all. if your board supports it and you need more space anyway, i say go for it.
PowerLinuxUser –
I got a shiny new Supermicro 5018DFN4T to put this drive into, as a virtualization server.If it worked, it was going to run like a greased pig at the state fair.Unfortunately, the Supermicro BIOS didnt recognize it so I couldnt install onto it.And Centos 7.3 didnt recognize it either, despite being a Linux 3.10.0 kernel and NVMe drivers being baked into Linux since 3.3.Oddly, when I booted Fedora 25 Linux 4.8 it saw the drive, which I was able to partition, format, copy files to, etc.So I ended up having to exchange it for a slightly slower, slightly more expensive Ta product instead.
Lois S. –
I keep hoping that these things will come down from the stratosphere. I spent more on drives for my new build than any other thing, even more in total than my i9… But I just couldnt see spending money for a fast CPU and fast memory, then running them from old fashioned disks that just slow everything way down.
Zachary P. –
A little pricey and not as big as I would like at the price point lol… but I have no complaints on performance or the purchase. This was installed in a Ryzen 7 1700x Build with a MSI Gaming Gaming x370 motherboard. No issues with install or getting the board to read the drive. I use this SSD for my main OS.
Anonymous –
In my air cooled system, neither of the NVMe EVOs reach 40 degree Celsius during normal operation. With average daily system use, the temperature hovers in the low 30s. Running benchmark on the other hand, like ChrystalDisMark, pushes the temperature close to 40 degree Celsius.
Charles L. –
Unless you are doing something that is diskintensive, you really arent going to notice a difference between this and a regular SATA SSD. However, it does allow you to get rid of a couple of cables, so the main benefit is in tidying up the inside of your case.
pixiedust1975 –
This product is a massive upgrade to my system but i was a little bit worried till i did my research on why i was only getting 800Mb transfer in the samsung software with my asus z97 board.1. samsung software said it was only running it at PCIe gen 2 x22. bought a PCIe M.2 card3. BIOS set to PCIe x4 in a x16 slot4. enjoy the 3000Mb read 1800Mb write speedsso now i am very happy with the drive indeed and works great as a game drive.PCI Express versionTransfer Rate TRPCIe 1.0 TR 2.5 GTs x1 250 MBs x4 1 GBs x8 2 GBs x16 4 GBsPCIe 2.0 TR 5 GTs x1 500 MBs x4 2 GBs x8 4 GBs x16 8 GBsPCIe 3.0 TR 8 GTs x1 984.6 MBs x4 3.94 GBs x8 7.9 GBs x16 15.8 GBsPCIe 4.0 expected in 2017 TR 16 GTs x1 1969 MBs x4 7.9 GBs x8 15.8 GBs x16 31.5 GBsWith the speeds of PCIe at the speeds that they are increasing to the expectation of M.2 drives are only going to get faster in time but will have to wait for the technology to utilise it.
Lawrence R. –
If you want the fastest M.2 2280 this is the one, but make sure you are using Intel. Had to go back to a Samsung 951 AHCI that I had to get this Ryzen 5 to post. MSI B350m Mortar Spoke to MSI to a very helpful tech support EMPLOYEE. At MSI and Samsung this is a know problem, that should have been worked out with the lazy bios coders, and Samsung, before the 5s and 7s were released. Amazing, the most coveted drive will not work with the most advanced designed processor to date…….NVME Express host controller interface specification, is too hard to write a bios the can recognize this drive flawlessly. Interestingly, Intels NVME M.2 is recognized on Ryzen.
Strife1013 –
I bought this for my new notebook that already came with a SSD drive. I wanted something faster and more space. This SSD drive is hands down super fast and Ive enjoyed it. Its a little pricey. Its 80 or so more than a 500GB version of the Evo 840 but well worth it for the speed increase and something that is a few years newer. I would buy this again.
Thomas A. –
My Pc tower is an old CMStacker that i bought in mid2000. Nestled away behind my home entertainment center in my living room. Installing this new style of SSD to your motherboard is not easy. Location for it on my motherboard is underneath the PCIE x1 slot where my Audigy soundcard is slotted. Screw used to fasten is extremely small. Tried fastening it three times with only removing my soundcard until i gave up. The angle with limited hand space and small screw made it impossible. Doesnt help when you slot in this SSD it doesnt lay flush to your motherboard. It angles up at roughly a 30 degree angle. Requiring one hand to hold it down while the other hand fastens the screw. Eventually i gave up and laid my Pc tower down on its side. Took a few attemptsminutes but the screw finally took to the thread. Ideal installation should be done outside your case giving yourself room to navigate hands positioning. Prior or after mounting your CPU with the heatsink. Additionally make sure your motherboard manufacturer supplied the screw. If they didnt, call them to get the size and or to order it from them. For in my search the screw size my MSI motherboard used was completely different than the size google searches supplied.
Paul Z. –
Im not the only person thats experienced issues with these drives, so if you need a drive to work the first time you get it, this might not be the drive for you. If however, youre willing to wait for a super fast drive, then I would recommend. If youre thinking about putting this into an ASUS ROG then you might see numbers like above something to keep in mind, but at 0.50gb its a hard to beat price. Knocking this down one egg, since I only ended up with one working drive.
jakbertugli0 –
The only drawback to a drive with this much speed and I do mean it is the fact that it will reveal other performance bottlenecks in your system such as memory bandwidth, graphics or CPU calculations per second. Observable boosts to every element of computing, glorious
Michael B. –
I moved from a CrucialMicron 1TB SATA6 M500 SSD that was getting full lots of games. I upgraded to this NVMe and honestly it doesnt really feel any faster than the old SSD. I wish I spent a bit more and got the 960 Pro NVMe since maybe it would feel faster. Installing it was a big pain since I didnt have the screw and had to hunt around for replacement screws to hold the NVMe drive in since obviously I lost the screw from the original motherboard as the PC was built over a year previously. I ended up finding a laptop screw that worked but I had to make a small custom washer for my rig. Typically the NVMe screw is M2 with a big wide head looks like a tack. I wish a few came with every motherboard purchased. The Samsung data migration software worked great to copy my m500 data to NVMe. I like the latest 4.x Magician software but hate the new v5.0 I upgraded to. Basically 5.0 seems like it does very little other than run a performance test and doesnt show much useful data like firmware version or allow you to optimize windows settings or see them. Its like they removed all the nerd knobs that PC enthusiasts like and made the software look pretty for someone like my mom who is not technical. Basically Magician 5 sucks so avoid upgrading to it if you can. Also on Magician it doesnt work with Samsung Enterprise drives and the tiny 1.3MB DL for Enterprise SSD management doesnt work or do anything so rather than figure out Samsungs software shortcomings I found it easier to stop buying Samsung SSDs server server builds and only use Intel drives in server builds because Intels software doesnt cause me headaches. Maybe Samsung wanted to design Magician 5 similar to its Enterprise SSD management software so useless. Overall Samsung SSDs are great but I wish they put some thought into Magician since clearly someone went brain dead on the software team.
Jacob D. –
Been out of touch on computer upgrades for at least 8 years, so Im not sure if the use of 4 sata ports is standard practice or just based on my mobo. However, it stinks that 46 of my chipset spots are taken, leaving 1 for HDD and 1 for optical drive… Highly Recommend, nonetheless
CLAYTON S. –
Originally I wrote and gave this 3 stars because I thought it came with somebody elses install of Fedora leading me to believe it was used. This was my mistake. Id added a second older drive to my rig which had an install of Fedora that Id completely forgotten about lol.
LarkSS –
First and foremost, this drive is fast with nearadvertised speeds see story below for more details. The response time and consistency has been exceptional, and my cold boot time on Windows 10 after enabling several MSI boot optimizations is now 2 seconds flat. Still amazes me several weeks later.Truthfully, I went through many hoops to get this SSD working with my motherboard MSI Z97GD65. However, this was due to my motherboard not having an m.2 port it has mSata which is significantly different and was my fault for not verifying this before my purchase. MSI was very gracious however, as about a year or so prior they released an update to their BIOS which added support for m.2 drives perfect I ordered an m.2 PCIE x4 adapter, updated the BIOS using a spare USB drive, and installed my new hardware. Initially, the drive was successfully detected by Windows 10 I had to rightclick on the start menu and then initialize the drive via Disk Management. My goal however was to migrate Windows over to this SSD to get off my 1TB HDD RAID setup. I went to a free faithful tool of mine Clonezilla. After installing the latest stable to a USB stick and booting off the stick, I eventually reached an unrecognized error during the process. Disappointed but not discouraged, I read on a forum post that the dev builds of Clonezilla were on a newer version of Linux with better drive technology support. So I gave it a shot and they were right Migration took about an hour for 500GBs of written data, and Ive been a happy camper since. The m.2 adapter causes a slight loss in performance yielding 85 of advertised read 2700MBs, yet still 100 of advertised write 1800MBs.I bought this drive for the performance, endurance and futureproofing. I expect this SSD to remain my main drive after building a new desktop a few years down the road. The performance is insane, taking my rapid loads from a dedicated SATA3 SSD for games to an entirely new level. For anyone still reading, my recommendations are to ensure your computer is compatible with m.2 at PCIE x4 speeds, that you are okay with your main GPU lane dropping to PCIE x8 MAYBE dropped 12 fps for me with my GTX 1080 and dual monitors, and that theres plenty of ventilation around the SSD to ensure that top speeds are consistent during huge data transfers.
Domen –
Super fast and also super expensive but well worth it if you have the money. Only problem being its capacity which is only 465 GB instead of 500 GB, so you are better of with 512 GB version which is even more expensive. And as far as performance goes, it achieves specified Read and Write speeds.
rouse4571 –
Unless youre willing to sell your gold teeth to get a Pro, you wont regret buying this. I allready had a 250b EVO with OS on and was very happy. The second M2 slot on my motherboard looked unhappy so i thought id cheer it up and use it to store regularly used steam games.
CHRIS –
A REAL PAIN TO GET WORKING Even IF you motherboard supports NVMe the Samsun 960EVO dont show up in many BIOS boot menu I had to use the Clover loader. Boot to a USB drive, that loads a driver to boot the Samsung. And this is even AFTER A BIOS UPDATE Asrock said the 950 worked fine but they had problems with the 960. Same for other motherboard MFG. Samsung REFUSED TO HELP since it used an add on card And wasnt originally supported NVMe, Even though the BIOS update added it But after OVER A WEEK of web searching, I finally found the Clover loader. And it took a white to find the parts to get it to work also But it does work good now, despite Samsung saying it is IMPOSSIBLE TO WORK ON MY MOTHERBOARD, even WITH A NVME UPDATE Samsung cloning software didnt work either I ended up using Partition Wizard 10. It worked great, supported SSDs, and was FREE Great company, would be worth it even if paid for Partition Wizard Samsung support was terrible After all that work I got about 3000MB read and 1100MB write speed for the 960EVO, only slightly slower than the specs. I had it a year now with no problems. And I added a HEAT SINK on the SSD board. Used a 6 SSD adapter from EBay.
Roger L –
Modern motherboards usually come with a slot for M.2 SATA or NVMe SSDs, which basically dont need external power compared to SATA SSDs. They are also much smaller.NVMe extends that by using a PCIExpress lane rather than a SATA connection, so you can get at least 26x faster data readwrite times from NVMe over even a M.2 SATA.NVMe is also more expensive. You can generally get twice as much storage in a M.2 SATA for the same prices as NVMe right now. With that being said, if you want a faster SSD for various reasons you edit 4k videos, gaming,and your motherboard can take NVMe check your specs before buying, then you should look at these SSDs over an M.2 SATA or even regular SATA drives. Otherwise it might just be overkill.
DL12 –
I built a new system about 3 weeks ago and installed this drive, wow what a difference between this SSD and a HDD drive. I will be installing more in other systems.My only recommendation would be for Samsung to provide handout that discusses the unique requirementstools associated with SSDs. This is my first SSD so I had to spend quite a bit of time searching the net for details on Trim, Over Allocate, etc.
Mark –
Pros Quick depending on what settings you can use ie x4 or standard. This will depend on the number of expansion slots you are already using, sata hard drives installed and lanes your motherboard allows. Do some research and ask some questions of your motherboard suppleir before diving in. Rliability unable to comment so a 5, its new hard to say but does have a 5 year or xTB transfer warranty.Cons Restricts the number of expansion slots andor sata hard drive slots depending on the number of lanes your motherboard has.I seem to be having resource issues between the .m2 slots and cpu. Seem to have yellow exclamation marks next to CPU driver, unresolved but system runs fine. Not getting the transfer rates advertised. to be continued…
Harvey K. –
It was fun while it lasted. Waiting on information from Samsung so I can send it back. Well I have sent this drive back 2 times now. The first one was replaced with another one. I started having problems with this one right from the start, system hanging, slowing to a crawl. I even reinstalled win 10 but with the same results. I just got it back from Samsung today and installed win 10 again, I dont think they did anything to the drive except reformatted it. Samsung has good customer service but I think I bought a piece of junk. I wont buy this from newegg ever again. I know what I am doing when I add new hardware
Anonymous –
after i used the data migration to clone from another drive my speeds were all over the place, then windows crashed and i had do a repair, speeds got even worse, sometimes. so after much trouble shooting i finally gave in and just did a fresh install. since then speeds are right where they should be, temps are not bouncing like they were either. guess its a well known thing that nvme drives do not like being cloned from another drive. now boot times are stupid fast and programs launch before the mouse button comes back up.
Robear99 –
I have had this drive for about two weeks now and I really love it. My Windows 10 boot time went from over 20 seconds to about 5 seconds not mention how much faster my apps run. If you want to boost your PCs performance this is the way to go. The only reason I did not give 5 stars to value is because all SSD drives are pricey but hopefully they will come down in price over time.
Michal –
Pros With the current NAND flash oversupply, you would be wise to purchase an NVMe SSD such as this one. The performance is simply stellar theres no other way to put it. I managed to get speeds comfortably over the advertised 3400R1500W MBs, so Im more than happy. Using it as a boot drive, my PC turns on and loads startup apps significantly faster than with a regular SATA3 SSD Cannot recommend it enough. Just make sure your motherboard NVMe slot or PCIE NVMe expansion card supports the high bandwidth. Fun fact, you can get NVMe supported TypeC enclosures on the internet for a blazing fast portable SSD.Cons Only thing Im slightly worried about is the 150TBW 5 year warranty whichever expires first. Id like to have the extra security the PRO series provides 300TBW per 256GB as opposed to 150TBW per 250GB, but theres obviously a reason its called the PRO series and Im fine with that. For anyone else using this as a boot drive I wouldnt worry too much about the TBW you probably wont be writing to it all that often unless its your one and only drive but if youre constantly erasing old tripleA games and downloading new ones then you might want to look into the 970 PROs.
1jescvv7 –
I love the Samsung brand SSDs among any other one in the market. Their performance is amazing, very fast and reliable. I recommend them to anyone.
Bob66 –
This is the second one of these Ive bought for my system.These units are blindingly fast and make an excellent boot drive.Although much faster than a standard SSD you wont really notice any huge difference over a standard SSD in the real world unless moving massive files around, although my boot time is now almost instant. The main attraction for me is the tiny form factor and clutter free installation.Make sure you have good ventilation in your case as these drives do run hot and will throttle back if to warm.
Daniel H. –
Really this is subjective and I probably expected too much, but if you want the best costvalue, go for a normal SSD. If you are a builder that has to have the sweetest, cleanest system, m.2s are the way to go and this one is probably the fastest and cheapest m.2 around. Ive never used the PRO, so I cant make any comparisons. Performance 5 Cost 1 Having to not use cables 5
Stephen S. –
This drive surprised me with how fast it was compared to my SSD 6GBsec Crucial. Bootup is very quick now. I thought this drive the best bang for the buck as though not quite as quick as the Pro, Im still getting over 2000 Mbs reads. I have a fan that mounts on the side of my case that blows down directly onto this drive so despite my heavy use, it has never throttled. I do suggest this as a means of avoiding throttling. I dont know what would happen without the fan because I never ran the drive without it.
Anonymous –
I have two of these in RAID0, If you need 2TB then I recommend doing this over getting the 2TB version as it is much more expensive. Keep in mind however that threadripper does not support bootable NVMe Raid. I havent had any issues with thermal throttling though my Cosmos II has an outrageous number of fans so Im not sure thats a great indicator in general.
John B. –
I hoped to install this in a Gigabyte motherboard I purchased in 2014. But without a M.2 connection, the motherboard did not detect the device in the BIOS. Without the motherboard recognizing this device as a hard drive, I could not set it as the boot drive. I could have used it in the PCI to M.2 adapter as in auxiliary drive in Windows 10, but I needed it to be a boot drive.
Anonymous –
Getting a bigger capacity drive is useful on M.2 because of 2 reasons the innate IOPS improvement speed on higher capacity drives1TB faster than 500gb of the same exact version of drive, as well as difficulty of upgrading to another m.2 in the future due to most mobos having only 1 m.2 slot. m.2 will be a slight pain to upgrade size laterdouble migration The drive is physically hanging ominously below my video card due to a missing screw that doesnt come with the drive or motherboard… at least i have a standoff included on my mobo to prevent it from bending too much. Also the second video card that is over the m.2 is pushing it down somewhat and fully plastic thereby preventing any shorting. it works it works it works without the screw lol i added this information for science. Buy a screw with ur purchase. Consider whether or not you really want load times to go away especially considering the increased cost of m.2 and the deminishing returns of load time reduction. i kind of miss them but not that much. i still get load times on things like steam opening and programs opening. Improvement seemed like only 10… only large files and hd loading is improved like windows startup. the m.2 clip seems sturdy and would prevent it from slipping out even while moving… ill put a screw in some day. the load time for windows with HDD can be 1060 second and with SSD can be 525 second and with this M.2 NVMe it can be 15 seconds. if these gains on windows 10 load time seem worth the extra cost of the drive, I recommend it for you. You dont need to format the m.2 drive if you are migrating with samsung software because the software clones partitions and formats correctly. this information was was not availible online and worried me while cloning.
geryboro –
Id built it into a notebook for change the old sata ssd. it had 500mb read and 300350 write speed. actually have 3000 read and 1500 write. excelent. thank you.
Aseb –
My computer basically boots in less than one second now. This product is fast and I would highly recommend going forward. How could the PRO version be even faster Amazing technology.
James L. –
I also have the EVO 950 that I formatted as a Dynamic. I planned to clone the 950 to this one and found out cloning Dynamic drives is a nightmare. I dont recommend that. If you have a Mobo with 2 M.2 slots, it will make a killer RAID.
Paul –
Pros Very fast if your motherboard supports it. Otherwise buy a daughter board believe me its worth it. The samsung drive cloning software is free and excellent.Cons None so far.
jerzy669 –
The fastest is only the Pro model. Around 200 is a good price. I cant wait for 1 TB for this price. My only concern about, how long these units were used. As a system drive, it is very fast, it is unmatched. Mounted to ASRock Z370M PRO4, it works perfectly.
philimarvi0 –
The price was worth the wait. This thing performs amazingly, and its sooooo tiny, it fits right under my GPU. The price may seem too good, but its credible. At the time, it was hard to find this for even under 250, so this was a good investment.
grant m. –
I would recommend this drive if you dont have a 1TB 2.5 sata drive. I have a 1TB 850 EVO 2.5 sata drive and the 1TB 960 EVO M.2 NVMe drive seems to be about the same speed for both of them. I would buy again if I need another drive. The Samsung drives are great drives and I will see how long this drive will last. I have both 1TB Samsung drives in my high end computer so I dont think I will run out of storage space anytime soon.
damayor1978 –
Ok so I knew it will be quite fast, but I havent guesses in a million years that this thing is that fast I mean the ssd is already fast..but this is light years apart I installed this in my asus maximus hero 8 alpha, was little tricky but after couple updates it was ready to roll I didnt use the Samsung software, didnt seem to work for me.. I highly recommend one of these drives.
Hal T. –
Bought this SSD on sale to update my sata SSD in my laptop. I have two Crucial MX300s in raid 0 in my desktop. This thing kills it on boot time. Make sure to go to samsungs website and update the firmware. It didnt run this fast till I did. Trust me. This thing is faster than the hype. The circle never even appears on the boot screen.
nopalez100 –
I am using this drive in my Ryzen 7 build, it really makes a difference, I bought this drive because after the investigation I did, it was the best consumer priceperformance nvme ssd in the market. It really does not dissapoint, it is compatible with AMD Ryzen, and it is FAST You can tell the difference against a normal Samsung SSD.
Anonymous –
Was awaiting this drive since it was announced. I replaced my 850 Pro 256GB as my OS drive and still have plenty of space to load up all my Steam Library on. Installation and migration was easy and I used Samsungs own migration tool to move my old data on to the 960. Whole migration took 15 mins from installation to completion. If your looking for an upgrade go for this drive you will not be disappointed.
Anonymous –
I practice incremental upgrades to my gaming rig. Since Kaby Lake is a weak update I am holding off until canyoncoffee gen chips come round next year. So I dropped this drive into a PCIe adapter with 4 lanes and am quite pleased. Its not running full at spec but even with only 4 lanes its ripping fast and boots windows in under 10 secs. Modern games heavily modded run liquid smooth as does any application I use to compile, render, etc. I literally wait for nothing except internet packets of course. I look forward to full utilization of this drive on newer mobo chipsets when I get there.
Eric C. –
From a HDD and SATA3 SSD speed this is a dream. After mem post Im like less than a minute until Im ready to login. Everything happens quick enough you simply dont notice. I went back to my old machine gave it to my daughter and was surprised at how fast I had gotten use to the new speed. This is a very noticeable increase over SATA 3 SSD Samsung EVO 850
Steven B. –
I have always been a fan of Samsung SSDs including the 850 EVO. I was amazed at how fast this M.2 actually was and for the price I paid. If you are looking for performance, and dont mind a little trouble with installation, this will greatly increase your computers performance.
Jason W. –
Had to replace my Mobo to get it to work correctly, this is my benchmark numbers… Max Sequential Read 1742.81 MBs Max Sequential Write 1823.18 MBs 4K Write 84.48 MBs 4K Read 39.93 MBs 4K64 Thrd Write 1534.47 MBs 4K64 Thrd Read 12.46.79 MBs Acc.Time write .045 ms Acc.Time read .053 ms Score Write 1801 Score Read 1458
margosensei –
Highly recommended by people at Geek Squad, its the fastest one, and usually sells for about 125 and up Im getting another one at 1T memory of this model next Love it
Kez –
Pros Next gen speeds. Remarkably easy to install provided you have a recent mother board.Cons Price is a bit steep but thats across the board. I favour the 500gb version as I think its best bang for buck.
Andrew –
Pros Easy to installCons If using a Z97 motherboard when installing any M.2 device will disable the sata ports 4 and 5 so if you have other drives plugged into these ports they will be disabled. Easy fix just unplug from 4or5 and plug into 2or3.
David C. –
New build. When I installed Windows 10, the 960 EVO M.2 drive immediately showed up as available. I didnt have to go into the BIOS boot drive menu at all. Ive had no issues with this SSD and I like the fact that I can keep the drive running optimally via Samsung Magician software. The only wish I had with using this M.2 SSD with my AMD RYZEN motherboard is that I wanted to use two of these at Gen3x4 in RAID 0 for my boot drive and critical programs. As far as I know, only the Intel motherboards would allow you to do this. The ASRock x370 Taichi has two m.2s but one is Gen3 x4 32Gbs and the other is Gen2 x4 20Gbs. I would think with future revisions and new motherboards that this issue will be addressed and we could set up RAID 0 with M.2 at Gen3x4.
Anonymous –
Replaced the stock 512G SSD my Asus Q324 came with this. This SSD is faster than the internal bus can handle, so my laptop is running as fast as it possibly can.
chris a. –
I have this drive mounted in a PCIE card. I have an 80mm fan blowing right onto the drive. It is 65 degrees in this room right now and I have adequate cooling in my case. This drive throttle VERY fast on writes. At this speed Ive got to go back to old SSDs.
Anonymous –
this is the first drive i have ever had fail. have been building pcs since 2008. if you are deciding to purchase an m.2, dont rely on it for your os or important documents.
kerry n. –
if this thing did not have a high failure rate, I would recommend it, but as it is I cannot recommend it. Would I buys this again Short answer No, there are to many great NVMe SSDs in the market at reasonable prices without high failure rates. Normally I do not give low ratings understanding sometimes technology just does not work, but the failure rates of these SSDs are unacceptable
Quark54 –
This is the second 960 Evo I have had experience of.If you already have a conventional SATA SSD then no, you wont notice a mind blowing increase in performance. However, you will in benchmarks.In my opinion this NVMe drive will be appreciated by enthusiasts like me, but is probably not the best choice for anyone on a budget, or anyone looking for a significant, noticeable, increase in performance. Boot times are lower, but other than that you may not be able to tell the difference between this and a basic 850 Evo SSD.
Conor S –
I bought this as my new boot volume in a new build gaming rig. Having had SSDs before, using SATA, i was extremely impressed by this things speed. The 2.5K MBPS put a smile on my face and some serious performance increases in my games and file transfer speeds.Have recommended this to several people and will continue to do so.1 note, go download the new drivers for it once installed.
bongomikey –
Sent item back to Scan because I thought it was faulty. Scan kindly returned and said it was OK. Tried again but Linux kept crashing. so had to load up Win 10 which boots in five sec. Had to put my Linux on a standard SSD and now all is fine. Guess I will have to wait for Linux to support this speedy little thing
CHRISTOPHER S. –
Samsung running on Asus PRIME very fast until it burned out. Reinstalled on Gigabyte PC and died again. I hope Samsung will reengineer this NVM with better voltage tolerance and heat resistence so it can work in the Real World not die so easily. DO NOT BUY THIS DRIVE. I Thank EaseUS Todo Backup for saving my data, because Samsung broke twice and I will NEVER buy another Samsung NVM stick. Samsung SATA III drives have proven themselves as much more reliable than these throw away NVM sticks. AVOID.
Paul S. –
Getting 3000MBps from CrystalMark in the ASRock Z270 Extreme 4 mobo Installed fresh Win10 in less than 15min I saw 20 improvement in random readwrite speeds after Samsung Magician optimization and replacing Win10s driver with Samsungs driver.
Dave B. –
I do recommend. This is the second one that I bought since I was filling the first one with games. This is the only brand ssd that I have bought so I cant say if others are better or worse, but I have no complaints about how it works. I bought this for a new computer build to replace my old aging computer from 2006. I wanted the next generation machine so I opted for no hard drive, ssd only. The outdated Windows XP served me well for all those years, but Windows 10 seems 1 step forward and 3 steps back, so I tried Linux Mint and it works, and I can play my games.
Bill J. –
Horrible drive. Do not buy. I have been struggling with it for a week with my brand new motherboard z370p and I get lag spikes and unresponsiveness. This has been a discussion on their forums for TWO MONTHS. How did I miss that They are promising new firmware the week of 129. I guess we wait. Brand new drive and I have to wait to use it properly. I wouldnt recommend this drive to Hilary Clinton. Even though she would have a valid excuse for losing emails if she had it.
mrrogers69 –
Bought this to replace a WD Black NVMe SSD. This drive is supposed to be 23x faster. I wasnt expecting to notice that much of a difference since the old drive was already pretty fast, but for some situations the Samsung actually is SLOWER. For instance it takes about 50 longer to boot up now. If I hadnt gotten a good deal on this drive I would be disappointed, but since I only ended up paying slightly more than the WD drive I have no real complaints.
ReggieMack –
I only use Samsung SSD products so im not surprised of the performance at all. What I am surprised about is the amount of time it takes from the push of the power button to the window screen. Less than 10 secs as opposed to close to 20. Games are more responsive also. All in all im loving this new M.2 drive. Will be getting a 1 tb drive soon..Thx Samsung..
Thomas K. –
I installed Samsungs NVMe controller and the drive flies as advertised. This is an upgrade from my previous 850 EVO. Here are a few benchmarks Crystal Disk Mark Seq Q32T1 Read 3388 Seq Q32T1 Write 1943 AS SSD Read 2862.02 Write 1786.16 Total 4218 System Specs Intel i76800K 4.3Ghz ASUS X99PRO 1TB Samsung 960 EVO 16GB G.Skill PC2800 CL15 DDR4 MSI 980 Ti Gaming Corsair H110 EVGA P2 850w Jonsbo W2 Case Dell U3011 Windows 10 Pro
Anonymous –
First of all, make sure your motherboard and chipset supports the M.2 NVMe interface, both that it has the physical slot and that your chipset has the available PCIe lanes. If not, you might be buying a drive that runs at regular ol SATA SSD speed or one that doesnt have any way to plug into your mobo P The difference between this product and the 960 Pro is higher MTBF, better warranty, and slightly more speed.
Terry F. –
Make sure to check your bios and tweak them to get all the speed out of the drive. Plenty of videos on youtube. Others complain of heat issues but mine doesnt exceed 55c. As long as there is air flow in your case you should be good.
Jeffrey E. –
I would recommend this drive to others, but while you are waiting it to ship to your house have the screw on hand. I put in a screw that was longer than I needed, you could easily get a 4MM long one. My ASUS Motherboard was a 2MM thread size which I hope is the same for other brands. The screw cost me 0.27 at the local hardware store. If you dont install the screw the drive stays lifted off the motherboard instead of being held in securely, I didnt try booting it up without it attached because I didnt want to damage anything. Not sure if it could, but I rather be safe than sorry
Ryan B. –
if you are here you know what it is and the performance you should be expecting. if it works as advertised you will not be upset. using mine as the boot drive on my new pc and I am very happy with the performance i get. it is under an included mobo heatsink and that does help with some heat
Patrick H. –
Look, this thing is fast, wicked fast but the only way you can tell is to run benchmarks. In normal computer use you will be hard pressed to tell the difference between this and a regular SATA SSD. If youre buying a new SSD then by all means get this one. Its high quality and fish speed but theres no real reason to upgrade from a decent SATA SSD unless youre into benchmarks.
matthew p. –
Its a blazing Fast drive. Use as your OS drive and you will be able to feel the improvement over a SATA III SSD drive its not that huge in real world times, but its there. I noticed the drive can get hot, but Im not sure if it throttles down performance as a result.
George L. –
Considering that the M.2 socket is spring loaded and points at an angle of about 30 degrees from the motherboard and the fact that the mounting screw is very small, you may find yourself trying to find the screw after dropping on the board. Be smart and tape down the drive to make it easy to do the screw.
NorBdelta –
If you thought the upgrade from an HDD to an SSD was a huge jump in performance, then you would be shocked at the difference between a SATA SSD and a NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD.Lightning fast startup and general Windows speeds, the only thing slowing my PC startup now is the external mechanical HDDs slow revup speeds on bootup. The Samsung Sticker itself is a metal strip for cooling if you wondered why it didnt come with a clear heatsink. You can get the performance benchmarks from the professional reviewers, and they are quite spectacular.Almost double the price of standard SATA SSDs, but you get so much more performance for your pound. Otherwise, it looks good and performs amazingly for quick game loads and everything else. It is quite something to load a BF1 multiplayer map in 10 seconds and be the first into the match. Single player games the same.The Pro version is faster but its cost it a bit too much to justify it compared to this Evo version. Considering the Evo is already double the GB of SATA SSDs, at the moment the Pro is a bit too much 150ish over the Evo for the same capacity but its up to you if you want to go all the way considering it is already high end.
pd1024768 –
I originally purchased a WD Black nVme drive, but this failed to work in my Asus Maximus Ranger VIII motherboard. I went with this 970 evo as Samsung devices are widely supported and highly regarded… justifiably so. This is a fantastic drive worked without issue and speed is blistering. Great device.
cybrow –
Amazing speed and compactness. Easy to install with no SATA power connections to plug in. Just slip it into an M.2 slot on the motherboard, add the tiny retaining screw and youre good to go. It sits out of the way with no tangle of wires to mess with. These run up to 4x as fast as regular SATA drives. They are not cheap but they are worth it. Recommended.
Anonymous –
BUYER BEWARE Think of what happens to a typical car engine when you use Nitrous oxide for that high performance the heads crystallize and your car is dead after a week. I do not recommend this product at all. Buyer beware. Even if you MSI people out there get it to work you still have to sacrifice your SATA 1 port along with that empty express lane and from all I have read this stick does not have a long life expectancy. In the long run maybe thats not a bad thing. This card is not stable and it is not fit for the market. I installed it in an ASUS X99E WS USB 3.1 motherboard with full native M.2 capability. No excuses. I will be seeking a refund.
Eugueny K. –
Well… its a very fast SSD. My Linux box boots a bit faster now. I upgraded from Samsung 950 SATA SSD and honestly I do not see any difference in day to day work, but thats because Linux caches everything I use in RAM anyway. Love how tiny it is, this makes MicroATX builds much easier.
Bobby B. –
Bought 2 of these to put in an Alienware 17 R3, set them up as Raid 0, after 2 weeks, 1 stick died. I thought oh, OK, Ill just use 1 stick and not use RAID 0. 2 months later the 2nd stick dies. Now I am using the original m2 SSD that came with it until I get these Samsung 960s replaced with Samsung 950s. Ive read that other people are having the same issue of the Samsung 960s dying too.
GRFTY –
This thing smokes every other SSD I have ever used. My motherboard takes 5x as long to post as this SSD takes to load Windows 10. I have never even seen the Windows loading screen. Windows is available almost instantly after the mobo posts.
NICHOLAS M. –
Windows 7 doesnt include NVMe drivers so the install disc will not see this drive, similar to raid drivers you typically just load them with a disc using the install browse option, however samsungs support website only includes the drivers as an .exe file which wont work for that purpose. That gives you 2x options to install Windows 7…. A install windows 7 on a blank hard disc drive, install drivers and updates, then load the samsung magician and clone the drive B Extract the samsung drivers manually youll notice they use the 950 evo drivers and then slipstream them into the install or write them to a blank disc which is a long process, there are several online users who have already done this for you if you want to simply use their work but be warned it is less secure unless you do it yourself note I did option B myself, was 2x hours of my life I wont get back and I had a deadline so was kinda annoying, but if you are installing on Windows 8.1 or 10 you should have no trouble at all, in fact ive installed a few of these guys for clients before and that has been a smooth process, this was my first Windows 7 attempt.
Donna E. –
I installed this in a new Ryzen build on an ASRock Taichi. I am running Windows7 on this without issue. To use it with win7, you need to install a fresh OS on an HDD. Download the Samsung drivers to a USB. Download two MS hotfix files… youll have to request them and add them to your USB you can find links to these at Toms Hardware. Once installed, use the Samsung cloning software Magician to clone from your HDD. Unplug the HDD and you are good to go. No need to downgrade to win10 spyware.
Icarus51 –
I bought this just over a week ago. What a fantastic piece of kit This is currently the 2nd fastest NVMe SSD in the market place. Youll obviously need a motherboard with an NVMe slot and a UEFI bios. Although you can get a PCIE adapter unless you have a UEFI bios to set up the SSD as a gpt disk then you cannot boot from it. Windows 10 loads in seconds and benchmark software shows 3300 MBs reads and 1500 MBs writes. It is so much faster than a SATA 3 disk.
Bradford F. –
I recently built a new system and decided to go with the 500gb NVMe as my main OS drive. The OS boots about the same speed as a regular SSD, maybe a second or two fast but its not terribly noticeable I also have 2x RAID arrays in my setup so the POST process takes a couple seconds longer anyways. In my setup I have this NVMe as my OS drive, a 850 2.5 as a High IO game drive and 2x WD 1TB in RAID 0 as a Low IO game drive. I put a few games on the NVMe drive but only the ones I play a lot while I prioritize everything else on the other 2 volumes. Even though this is a EVO drive, it loads games insanely fast. I had some games Stellaris, HOI4, EFT that were heavily modded and they load in seconds, literally seconds. I used to run them on a 4x WD 1TB Raid 0 SSD like speeds but with HDD. And there is just no comparison to even the EVO NVMe. Build MSI Z270 Pro Carbon Gaming Intel i77700K Corsair Hydro Series H115i G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB 16gb x2 3200mhz ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme Core 11GB GDDR5X 352bit Samsung 960 EVO M.2 500GB NVMe OS Drive, Win 10 x64 HGST DeskStar 0S04005 4TB 7200RPM 128mb x3 in RAID 5 primary data drive SAMSUNG 850 EVO 2.5 500GB SATA III 3D NAND High IO games drive WD Black Series WD1003FZEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB x2 in RAID 0 Low IO games drive LG 34UC79GB 34 Ultrawide 2560 x 1080 144hz Toshiba 32L2400U 32 1920 x 1080 60hz
Vance J. –
Great brand, speed. Using an NVMe drive is MUCH faster that SATA drives of any type. This is a PCIe drive which is the fastest. I am going to add a second NVMe drive to the mobo to use as a scratch drive for the video editing and that may speed up editing even more.
Anonymous –
Had this installed in an Alienware M17x R4 for about a week. Worked great until I chose to play some music files sitting on this drive. Windows Media Player wouldnt come up, then suddenly the computer became unresponsive. A reboot resulted in hanging during BIOS detection. Fortunately I kept the 128 mb drive that came with the machine so I could still use it to boot. No matter what M.2 slot I put the 960 Evo into, the computer wouldnt get past BIOS startup. Once I took the drive out, the computer was fine, so I knew it was the 960 causing the problem. Returning for a replacement, assuming the drives come back in stock.
Tim G. –
First SSD and this drive is impressive. Wanted the 960 Pro but out of stock when I ordered. Did some quick research and found this Evo to be also regarded very highly. Already moved my C partition off of a WD black drive to this drive. Noticed quicker load times in games and in the Windows 10 environment immediately. If you havent made the switch to SSD yet, do it.
PhotoFrank68 –
I replaced a 256 Samsung 950 Pro with this. It does everything it is rated to do and more. Cant see any reason to pay the premium for the 960 Pro unless you have it in an environment that it is under constant write use and you need the added service life that the 960 Pro offers. Even though the 950 Pro is a really fast PCIe SSD my graphics station boots faster and Adobe Premier Pro and Photoshop load quicker.I installed the 950 Pro that the 960 EVO replaced into a PCIe slot using an adapter. As long as the adapter is inserted in a 4 lane or 8 lane slot the SSD runs the same speed as it did on the built in 4 lane M.2 slot on the motherboard. You can also run it on a mother board that only has a two lane slot. On a two lane slot the read speed will be cut in two, but the write speed will only suffer about 30 percent. Obviously even these new fast drives still dont have the write capacity to fully saturate the bus.If your BIOS has support to boot from the PCIe slot you can boot from there also. The advantage to that is that the M.2 will most likely run cooler as it has airflow around it although this 960 EVO runs at about 29 degrees at idle and about 4143 degrees C under load on the motherboard slot.These Samsung PCIe M.2 960 EVO SSDs remove the Video and Photo processing bottleneck that is present even with SATA SSD drives on high end editing machines.By using these fast PCIe drives to load from and save and render to, my computer with its i7 on a Z170 board and much processing being handed off to an Nvidia GTX 1070 will now take whatever I throw at it and never flinch. May the RAID0 rest in peace as they are no longer relevant. Progress has made them obsolete and useless. Hail the new king in fast consumer affordable storage and OS drives.