Samsung 960 EVO SSD features same Polaris controller and TLC flash as PM961

Tom's Hardware took a look at what Samsung's 960 EVO NVMe SSD has to offer by testing the PM961, this part is designed for the OEM market but is believed to be very similar to the upcoming 960 EVO. The latter is expected to arrive next month and is believed to feature the same Samsung Polaris SSD controller and Samsung 48-layer TLC V-NAND flash memory.

This should result in read speeds of up to 3000MB/s, write speeds of up to 1150MB/s and random 4k write performance of up to 280,000 IOPS. You can check out the full preview over here, and see how it compares to the Intel 600p.

Samsung's 48-layer TLC V-NAND is able to deliver up to 1600 MB/s with 128KB blocks in SLC mode and only two NAND packages. In native TLC mode, the performance drops to around 650 MB/s. In contrast, the Intel 600p 512GB achieves 550 MB/s with simulated SLC and fluctuates wildly after the cache is full. The Intel 600p does not use a direct-to-die write technique (which circumvents the SLC layer when it is full) so all of the data written to the drive must pass through the SLC buffer and then fold into the TLC. Intel's caching scheme makes it difficult to determine its native TLC performance. The 600p's wild teeter-totter during the 128KB sequential write workload fluctuates between 450 MB/s and 20 MB/s. No, I didn't miss a zero there--20 MB/s is accurate.