Historically, Samsung’s OEM solid state drives were not worth much attention from PC enthusiasts since they were tuned for reliability and price more than performance. That changed a few years ago with the XP941 and then later the SM951, OEM M.2 drives that delivered much higher performance than any other consumer drive on the market at the time. Later Samsung released a consumer drive with comparable performance with the 950 Pro but now they’re once again raising the performance bar with a new OEM drive, the Samsung SM961.
Like the 950 Pro, the SM961 is a NVME PCIe 3.0 x4 drive using V-NAND. The big difference is the new controller (named Polaris amusingly enough), which increases the maximum read and write speeds to 3200MB/s and 1800MB/s respectively on the 1TB model. The new controller is also supposedly more power efficient and should generate less heat to reduce thermal throttling.
Guru3d.com has more detailed specs here.
While it’s absolutely crazy to think we’re already seeing a drive that hits the limit of PCIe 3.0 x4, I’m more interested in seeing benchmarks on the random read/write performance since that’s more relevant when using one of these as a boot drive.
Surprisingly these drives will be available very soon from RamCity.au, with the 1TB model showing to receive stock today even. A big improvement over the Samsung 950 Pro, which is still not out yet. Pricing is good too, with the 512GB SM961 at $260 USD including international shipping, $60 cheaper than the 512GB 950 Pro.
The main downside to getting one of these instead of waiting for the eventual consumer version is motherboard support isn’t guaranteed and the OEM drives are not compatible with the Samsung Magician software. Warranty would normally be a problem too due to their OEM nature but RamCity is offering a 3-year warranty themselves which is great.
Thoughts? Join the ongoing discussion in the forum here.
Image source: RamCity.au
