PROS:
• Unbelievably fast read AND write speeds
• Noticeable difference in program startup times
• Easy physical install
• Samsung Magician and Data Migration software are worth using
• 5 year warranty
CONS:
• Very expensive
• Full performance may be limited on some systems or require workarounds to achieve max performance
• Heat and power may be an issue for laptop systems
I love the size and speed of my card. Windows boots up from a restart in just a few seconds, it's fantastic. HOWEVER, be sure that your motherboard isn't a dud at supporting NVMe. I bought a $200 board from Gigabyte, a gaming board, that occasionally decides that it doesn't detect any NVMe drives. I re-flash the board, and suddenly it recognizes the drive and boots up like usual. I've got 2 M.2 slots and it behaved the same way on both. It can't be the card if a re-flash solves the issue.
Moral of the story: be sure you've got solid NVMe support before buying.
Used as ZFS ZIL/ARC on home file server and as primary disk for workstation. That SSD rocks, except that even Pro series have not so good endurance (only 400TB lifetime writes). Good enough - all I/O intensive workload is at ramdisk.
So, perfect for workstations with optimized I/O.
Can't recomment it for enterprise servers.
For high workloads there are relatively cheap SAS3 (12Gb/s) SSDs with 5 WPD (5 full rewrites per day) and 5 years warranty - that is 0.5*5*365*5=4562 TB. And it's not a high-end SSD - high end SSDs have about 15 PB lifetime writes for half-TB drive (30+ times higher endurance and only 3 times more expensive than 960 Pro).
| Hard Drive | 512 GB Nvme |
|---|
