We've seen how quickly their 950 M.2 drive was in a previous review, and with the 960 Pro they promise to have built upon the capabilities of the 950 and refined them with the implementation of a new Polaris controller, improved V-NAND and combining the 1.2 NVMe protocol with improved Windows 10 drivers to give professional users, enthusiasts, and those who work in seriously demanding productivity scenarios a storage option that will keep even the most bandwidth heavy user sated. Samsung, as befits a Memory chip giant, have been at the forefront of this move into the stratosphere. Then came Intel's NVMe and a swathe of motherboards supporting both M.2 and U.2 drives. A few years ago 500MB/s drives were blowing our minds, and using them in RAID to get 1GB/s seemed to be so fast that nothing would get near it for a long time. But Solid State Drives have changed so quickly they have rapidly moved beyond all recognition. Sure processors get incrementally faster and have a few more cores now and then, and a graphics card can gain performance through the addition of extra cores and some architectural improvements. If you have any other comments or questions on this topic, please let us know in the comments below.There have been few hardware items that have seen such rapid development as storage.
Q: Is there a performance difference between using Samsung's and Microsoft's NVMe drivers on a Samsung SSD?Ī: Probably, but we haven't done any systematic testing on this question yet.
If a customer's build comes with a Samsung NVMe drive, we install Samsung's driver in our pre-installation.Īnyway, whatever SSD vendor you might use, it might be worthwhile to check your vendor's product page for driver and/or firmware updates. That's why we included Samsung's NVMe driver into our deployment system.
However, we sometimes noticed compatibility issues when installing on the very latest Samsung SSD. Q: What if my SSD is from a different brand?Ī: Microsoft Windows has its own NVMe driver which works with pretty much any brand, including Samsung. But beware the golden rule: backup all your important data before updating your SSD or HDDs firmware.
via disk cloning) that has Samsung's NVMe driver installed from an older Samsung SSD to an unsupported '980' series SSD, your Windows installation will not be able to boot. If you migrate a Windows installation (i.e. The very latest Samsung SSD 980 and 980 PRO are not supported. Since early September 2021, we install Samsung NVMe Driver 3.3 and we will make sure to keep it up to date.Īs of the date of this post, Samsung's NVMe Driver supports SSD 970 PRO, 970 EVO, 970 EVO Plus, 960 PRO, 960 EVO and 950 PRO. We found that the latest Driver 3.3 fixed Standby issues on some of our product series. But any rate, we found that updating the Samsung NVMe driver can as helped in some of these cases.Ĭase in point: up until end of August 2021, we pre-installed Samsung NVMe Driver 3.1 in our deployment system. They might also be dependent on the Windows OS Build you are using.
might only occur on Intel or only on AMD). Such issues might only occur on certain platforms (i.e. System unable to transition from Standby to Hibernate.We have documented cases of some laptops that had Standby and Hibernate problems while running outdated drivers. If your laptop is equipped with a Samsung SSD with M.2 interface (except 980 series, see disclaimer below), please make sure you are running the latest Samsung NVMe driver.