The 960 EVO would not be the first Samsung retail product to ship without eDrive support initially, but then add the feature after retail products arrived on the market. The 960 EVO does not currently support Microsoft's eDrive, but Samsung is considering adding support. The 960 EVO supports full disk encryption, but only with Trusted Computer Group compliant software. We cover the driver in more detail later. The driver also increases performance beyond what Windows provides with the flush limit turned off.

We know that installing Samsung's driver clears the high hurdle of Window's data flushing command, which increases data write performance. We know very little about Samsung, or any other company's, custom NVMe drivers. We also received Samsung's NVMe Driver 2.0 with the 960 EVO. That allows 60% more data to transfer, which is a full 253GB of data during sequential reads on 512GB-class products. The 960 EVO can operate a full 16 seconds longer than the 950 Pro before the dynamic thermal guard (DTG) triggers and reduces performance to maintain a safe thermal envelope. Throttling seems to occur in stages to minimize the impact on the user experience.

The company placed several copper layers under the black paint, and the printed circuit board also features a larger, thicker copper layer that is in closer proximity to the heat source. For what it is worth, there is a thin copper strip between the adhesive layers and printed layer on the label. Samsung highlights the thin copper strip that it embedded in the 960 EVO's label, but we have our doubts about its effectiveness. The Polaris controller runs cool during general desktop use, but it has a high thermal ceiling. Samsung attacked thermal throttling from several angles. There is such a wide delta between Samsung’s published data and our measured performance numbers that we list the claimed performance here, but focus on our test results later in the review. We crushed Samsung's QD1 numbers using an ASRock Z97 Extreme6 motherboard with a direct-to-CPU PCIe M.2 channel. Samsung also publishes queue depth one (QD1) performance specifications that it generated using a Z170 motherboard. Samsung achieved the extremely high sequential performance, which reaches a maximum of 3,200 MB/s read and 1,900 MB/s write, under conditions that are unrealistic with today's software applications. Samsung publishes the expected speeds-and-feeds data, but most of the measurements are dependent on the platform and test software, so the results are open to interpretation. We didn't have many details about the controller until last month when Samsung hosted storage media in South Korea for the unveiling of the retail 960 series. We first learned about the Polaris controller in early 2016 when Samsung held a small briefing for Asian OEM customers in Japan. Samsung’s 5-core Polaris controller that came to market in June on the OEM-specific SM961 NVMe SSD serves as the heart of the 960 EVO.

950 pro 512 nvme diskmark results