Samsung announces high-end 950 Pro SSD for demanding consumers and business users

The benefits provided by SSDs are not only appreciated by more-demanding consumers, but also by business users. Which is why, with its new premium SSD line called 950 Pro, Samsung is targeting both markets.

What makes Samsung's 950 Pro drives attention-worthy are, first and foremost, the insanely high transfer speeds, five-year warranty, and competitive price. The line has been designed with high-end laptops and PCs in mind, but, even so, the performance figures provided by Samsung seem surreal.

First of all, it should be said that the 950 Pro line is comprised of two drives, one with 256 GB of storage and the other featuring 512 GB. Samsung does not offer the exact performance ratings for its "lower-end" model, but it claims that the 512 GB 950 Pro features read speeds of up to 2,500 MB/s and write speeds of up to 1,500 MB/s.

The transfer speeds are similar to Samsung's SM951 SSD, which, like the 950 Pro drives, is designed with the PCIe 3.0 interface and offered in the M.2 form factor. That form factor is meant for ultra-slim devices, like ultrabooks.

Samsung says that its new 950 Pro SSDs are up to four times faster than traditional SSDs, which use the older SATA interface. Random read performance is rated at 300,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second), while random write performance is at a claimed 110,000 IOPS.

As the line caters to enterprise customers, Samsung has bestowed it with AES 256-bit full disk encryption and Dynamic Thermal Guard technology to ensure the drive and the data it contains is unaffected in temperatures between 0 degrees and 70 degrees Celsius.

The 950 Pro drives also come with a five-year warranty, with the mention that Samsung covers it for up to 200 written terabytes for the 256 GB model and 400 written terabytes for the 512 GB model. What does that mean?

To write 200 TB of data in a year, one would have to write about 575 GB of data every day. That is a figure that is difficult to reach and sustain for a whole year, and, generally, you have to go out of your way to get close -- one way to do that is transfer lots of large files. And it seems highly conservative.

In an article I wrote about SSD longevity, I discussed the predecessor of the 950 Pro line. Called 940 Pro, it lasted fine until 2 PT (petabytes, or 4,096 TB) of data were written to the drive.

To put things into perspective, it would mean that instead of talking about a one-year service life (in the context mentioned above), we would be looking at 10 and 20 years of use for the 256 GB and 512 GB model, respectively, of the 950 Pro line. It is safe to say that they should last more than Samsung's willing to guarantee them for.