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Samsung 960 PRO / EVO Owners Club

221K views 2K replies 292 participants last post by  Celcius 
#1 · (Edited)
I think this is the right time to start the official OCN thread of the Samsung 960 PRO and 960 EVO NVMe SSD's.

Amazon said they plan to start selling them on the 6th of December, and I know some members here already seem to have them. Since these new SSD's are based on a completely new controller, they do not fit well with the previous 950 Pro series. So a new Owners thread is in order.

More info:
1. It has been determined by at least one member that the new 960 series does NOT boot on older BIOS only hardware such as the x58 chipset. Confirmation is needed from more OCN members though please. ALSO, see Jan 1st edit below.
2. New Magician 5.0 software released today on November 28th 2016.

EDIT: Jan 1st, 2017
Found this interesting information on new years day, its a method to boot the 960 SSD on older bios systems apparently, but I have not verified if it works or not. I hope someone can verify this method and comment on the thread how easy or hard it is to do.
https://audiocricket.com/2016/12/31/booting-samsung-sm961-on-asus-p6t-se-mainboard/
EDIT2: July 15th, 2017
Well this DUET UEFI boot on older hardware works far better than I expected it to. In the many years I have had my system, Xeon + x58 + 12GB DDR3 I have never seen it run this good before. Shaved time off my bootup as well. Well worth the investment.



Samsung 960 webpage HERE!

Samsung Driver / Firmware / Magician Download page HERE! (NOTE: Always download and install the latest Magician software, because it is the only way to know when new drivers OR firmware becomes available)

DIRECT LINK TO THE NVMe Drivers, now on Version 3.0
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/#ge_semi_anchor_stand4

Let the 960 series Owners now come forth and share their performance results and experiences please. Thank you very much.





 
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#2 ·
Just as a note, clubs/threads can't be tagged Official unless a section editor approves of it (or a section mod if there aren't any editors).
 
#3 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chunky_Chimp View Post

Just as a note, clubs/threads can't be tagged Official unless a section editor approves of it (or a section mod if there aren't any editors).
OK thank you, I just spoke with a admin and I thought he told me to start this thread first. So I need to remove just the part about official, right? Then the admin can change it later if they so wish.
 
#4 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chunky_Chimp View Post

Just as a note, clubs/threads can't be tagged Official unless a section editor approves of it (or a section mod if there aren't any editors).
I find the "Official" pointless to be honest. It's a discussion forum, nor an official document from Samsung. "Official" adds nothing to the table in a message board discussion thread unless it was some official statement from a company addressing something.

Just my 2 cents
 
#5 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Snappy Phoenix View Post

I find the "Official" pointless to be honest. It's a discussion forum, nor an official document from Samsung. "Official" adds nothing to the table in a message board discussion thread unless it was some official statement from a company addressing something.

Just my 2 cents
It's meant to be official in the capacity of "This is OCN's official thread for this", not "This is Samsung's own official thread here", if that makes sense, so that there aren't multiple clubs/threads on the same thing.
 
#6 ·
Figured it out, I removed the official tag. Thanks for the heads up.

I just want to start seeing REAL info on this SSD from people who claim to OWN them. However, talk of this SSD is already poisoning other SSD threads and taking them off topic. Its more then an appropriate time to start a thread just for this amazing SSD. I am sure others agree.
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#7 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chunky_Chimp View Post

It's meant to be official in the capacity of "This is OCN's official thread for this", not "This is Samsung's own official thread here", if that makes sense, so that there aren't multiple clubs/threads on the same thing.
Yeah good point, then they should actually read "[Official] Samsung 960 Pro OCN Owners Club", haha...
 
#8 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chunky_Chimp View Post

It's meant to be official in the capacity of "This is OCN's official thread for this", not "This is Samsung's own official thread here", if that makes sense, so that there aren't multiple clubs/threads on the same thing.
oh ok, thanks for the clarification
 
#11 ·
Waiting for the 960 Pro 512GB
biggrin.gif
 
#13 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by mnoc View Post

I have seen one reference in the 950 thread that the 960 does not boot on X58. Would be nice to verify this 100% by hearing from multiple sources who actually own both. Or is there already confirmation elsewhere on the internets?
Yeah confirmation will come eventually, we just have to wait for this to hit the shelves in mass. I personally have a hard time believing that Samsung dropped support for older systems entirely though. Why in the world would you limit your sales to just new systems when the only real requirement is PCIe and only PCIe? That is exactly like GPU manufacturers making new GPU's work only on PCIe 3.0 and not the millions of systems with only PCIe 2.0. But since this 960 series has a new controller it very well could be concentrating on the new UEFI technologies and not have backwards compatibility. This would mark the first time in computer history that a storage company did not build in backwards compatibility for consumer level IDE legacy support though. Which seems highly unlikely to me.

The weird thing is building in legacy bios support does nothing what so ever to performance numbers on newer systems. So dropping support for legacy systems does only one possible thing, lose you millions of dollars. Seems crazy for a business to do that intentionally....
 
#15 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by rxl-gaming View Post

Finally obtaining my Samsung 960 Evo tomorrow guys
smile.gif



Congratulations, lets hope the wait was worth it for you
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And lets also hope stock does not fall short right away.
 
#16 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by }SkOrPn--' View Post

Congratulations, lets hope the wait was worth it for you
thumb.gif


And lets also hope stock does not fall short right away.
Well with some luck i can grab another with a higher capacity at a later date but via a phone call to the company i bought it from there is an apparent shortage of V-Nand

this is live from the website that i purchased it from

like you said hopefully the stock doesn't fall short

"November 2016 Update

Due to NAND chip shortages across the industry, Samsung has delayed availability of this range until late November / early December.

We understand this comes as a disappointment to our customers. Unfortunately this will affect all sellers of this drive worldwide. SPAN.COM will be one of the first stores anywhere to stock this item and at a very competitive price. To ensure you receive yours as soon as possible, we strongly recommend ordering online today, as shortages are expected to continue until well into 2017."
 
#17 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by rxl-gaming View Post

Well with some luck i can grab another with a higher capacity at a later date but via a phone call to the company i bought it from there is an apparent shortage of V-Nand

this is live from the website that i purchased it from

like you said hopefully the stock doesn't fall short

"November 2016 Update

Due to NAND chip shortages across the industry, Samsung has delayed availability of this range until late November / early December.

We understand this comes as a disappointment to our customers. Unfortunately this will affect all sellers of this drive worldwide. SPAN.COM will be one of the first stores anywhere to stock this item and at a very competitive price. To ensure you receive yours as soon as possible, we strongly recommend ordering online today, as shortages are expected to continue until well into 2017."
Yep, new NAND type usually does result in early shortages until during off season when less people are buying them and they catch up to normal demands and then manufacture a surplus for future products. Not only that but OEM's are probably getting first crack at them I assume, assuming there are OEM versions being made.

I plan on getting two of these PCIe ssd's, but I might just replace my 850 ssd with a 950 since I know for fact it boots on my system. Then populate the second slot with the 960 just for local storage. Then once this machine gets retired and replaced with a Z270 board transfer both the 950 and 960 to the new system, and then hope Optane isn't far behind, lol. My entire upgrade path relies on Optane support being fully implemented on my next system and I don't think that is coming before we see Z270.
 
#18 ·
Im waiting patiently for NCIX Canada to get stock of the 512GB 960 Pro. Thats the one im getting if i can get one before year end as my company has the $$$ to spend so i need to spend it this year
rolleyes.gif
biggrin.gif

Otherwise if i cannot then a 950 Pro will have to do sadly.
I check with my Account manager weekly and also keep tabs on Newegg.ca and CanadaComputers. Anywhere else i should look to find one?
 
#20 ·
dang that thing is small, lol... The pictures seem to make it look bigger, haha.
 
#21 ·
Yes basically they are sticks of gum. Back in 2015 I paid $500 for an SM951, and ever since I have to remind myself to be careful when I handle it, it seems something so small and light can't be worth that much.

I also have a 950, and experimented with RAIDing them. But new plan is to get at least one more drive (or two or three if I sell one or two of the existing ones) so I can RAID two together and have a separate non-RAID boot drive. I decided I don't want to trust my valuable data to a single device, whether it has moving parts or not, so I will RAID 1 two M.2 drives together via Storage Spaces using ReFS. Since this is not bootable, need another M.2 to hold Windows. Ideally all three of these should be 960 Pros, but the boot drive may need to remain the existing 950 if the 960 really removes legacy BIOS boot.

A side benefit will be that the M.2 RAID will be even higher performance than a single M.2 for some benchmarks at least (since with striping, RAID 1 reads as fast as RAID 0 while still writing as fast as a single drive), and plenty fast for my purposes in the others.

Personally, I don't expect Optane to be 1) available + 2) faster + 3) affordable compared to M.2 for 2-5 years, so I am building the best system I can now (on top of my existing components) in the expectation that I will be using it for a long while.
 
#22 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by mnoc View Post

Yes basically they are sticks of gum. Back in 2015 I paid $500 for an SM951, and ever since I have to remind myself to be careful when I handle it, it seems something so small and light can't be worth that much.

I also have a 950, and experimented with RAIDing them. But new plan is to get at least one more drive (or two or three if I sell one or two of the existing ones) so I can RAID two together and have a separate non-RAID boot drive. I decided I don't want to trust my valuable data to a single device, whether it has moving parts or not, so I will RAID 1 two M.2 drives together via Storage Spaces using ReFS. Since this is not bootable, need another M.2 to hold Windows. Ideally all three of these should be 960 Pros, but the boot drive may need to remain the existing 950 if the 960 really removes legacy BIOS boot.

A side benefit will be that the M.2 RAID will be even higher performance than a single M.2 for some benchmarks at least (since with striping, RAID 1 reads as fast as RAID 0 while still writing as fast as a single drive), and plenty fast for my purposes in the others.

Personally, I don't expect Optane to be 1) available + 2) faster + 3) affordable compared to M.2 for 2-5 years, so I am building the best system I can now (on top of my existing components) in the expectation that I will be using it for a long while.
Since the 1990's I raided everything and it took me until the 850's to realize I no longer needed to do it. Now, that you mention how fast these are, even when raided it is making me think twice about it, haha. However, I just dont have enough super important data to worry about storing on drives, so I use cloud for the really important stuff I can't lose. And my server has 6TB (3x2TB) of spinning drives, which would suck if they break down, but with monitoring software I sure hope I catch it before they do die like I did earlier this year. I didn't lose one bit of data although the drive dropped to 40% health, lol. It took 3 days to pull the data off of that drive though.

Someday I hope we see 10tb SSD's for prices like $120, and I hope that day is soon, not 20 years from now.

Oh, and with SSD's that small you would think that they could now bundle motherboards with storage space already on them? Dads gigabyte board has 20GB of space soldered to it but I think it is slow sata intel drive, not something taking advantage of the PCIe bus.
 
#24 ·
Hi Guys, I have the 960 Pro (512GB) in my new pc (a Gigabyte X99P-SLI motherboard with 6800K). I hope you don't mind that I'm noticing two issues I hope someone can help with or perhaps others with the 960 can comment on too.

1. My speeds are around 1500MB/s read/write using ATTO, Samsung's Magician and CrystalDiskMark. The Magician software (v5) is saying the drive is running at PCIe x4 Gen 2 instead of Gen 3. In the BIOS, I forced the PCI slots to run at Gen 3 so I'm out of options for what could be wrong.

2. The Magician software (v5) isn't recognizing my drive even though Samsung says the 960 Pro/EVO should fully support it.

I'm currently running Windows 7 Pro with all the latest updates and using Samsung NVMe driver (v2). I'll take screenshots later today if helpful.

If you guys are curious about the 960 Pro and want me to try anything let me know as well.

UPDATE: I'm going to try this disabling using XMP profile as per shadowrain response here and perhaps not OC the processor and see what happens: http://www.overclock.net/t/1579581/official-samsung-950-pro-owners-club/1710

UPDATE 2: I disabled CSM (eventhough that option only appears if I say I'm running Windows 8/10)
UPDATE 3: I enabled XHCI Hand-Off

Result: still PCIe Gen 2 x4
 
#26 ·
Received my new 960Pro 1TB yesterday. Finally. What a wait. 4 different companies with ever changing due dates, constantly moving out.

These things are as rare as hens teeth here in Australia (and the rest of the world).

Build date on the box shows: 2016 11 12

From boot to screen 5 seconds.

Fresh install of Win10 via USB 3.0 drive was 1 minute 58 seconds
biggrin.gif


So far very happy. It is my main drive. Secondary drive is my 850 Evo 1TB that was built in early November as well.

jD87Yoc.jpg
 
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