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Samsung announced a new family of ultra-high end SSDs today, dubbed the 950 Pro. This new drive family will debut by the end of October at $199 for 256GB drives and $349 for the 512GB flavor. That’s a fair increase over current 2.5-inch SSD models — the Samsung 850 Pro currently sells for $139 at NewEgg, while the 512GB flavor is $237. The 950 Pro’s argument for its higher cost lies in stratospheric performance — up to 2500MB/s read and 1500MB/s write.

Samsung has hit these performance figures while using the same Vertical NAND it deployed for last years 850 Pro. We’ve covered the company’s 48-layer chips elsewhere, but that’s not what it used for this new round of drives.

Let’s put those performance numbers in perspective, shall we? Back in 2009, Samsung partnered with WorldCyberGames to illustrate just how insanely fast an SSD RAID could be. Put 24 2009-era MLC drives in a raid, and you know what you hit in terms of sequential performance? Around 2GB/s. Yes, that means Samsung is claiming its single 950 Pro is now faster than 24 drives were six years ago. We’re living in the future, baby.

To hit these kinds of performance levels, Samsung is using the newer NVMe interface as opposed to the older AHCI standard. AHCI was originally designed for spinning disks, and while it works with SSDs, it wasn’t optimized for them. NVMe allows for better overall speed and, alongside an x4 PCIe 3.0 connection courtesy of the M.2 drive standard (version 2280), will let Samsung hit performance levels standard SSDs can’t match.

There’s no denying the sheer potential of a drive like this, but whether or not it’ll make much difference in normal workloads is a very different question. To-date, high-end SSDs can offer significant improvements over SATA-based kin, but not always enough to justify their price. It comes to workloads — the upgrade from an HDD to an SSD is far more impressive than the performance kick you’ll get from SSD to SSD, even if you leap for a PCI-Express drive as opposed to a conventional SATA port.

Then again, this is a ridiculously fast drive for a price of just 68 cents per GB for the 512GB Samsung 950 Pro. It’s hard to argue with top-end performance when even the premium drives aren’t nearly as expensive as they were a few short years ago. Higher-capacity drives will still pack a huge premium, however — don’t expect to be dropping a 16TB drive into a consumer system any time soon.

Read more http://www.extremetech.com/computing/214731-samsung-announces-new-950-pro-ssd-with-blazing-readwrite-speeds-on-tap