The Samsung 950 Pro SSD—the follow up to the legendary Samsung 850 Pro SSD—has been unveiled by the company at its annual SSD summit in Seoul, Korea. The 950 Pro will be available at retail in October, with MSRPs of $199.99 (probably ~£150) for the 256GB version, and $349.99 (~£280) for the 512GB version. UK pricing is yet to be confirmed.

Based on Samsung's V-NAND technology and available in 512GB and 256GB capacities, the 950 Pro shuns the common 2.5-inch form factor and SATA interface for cutting-edge M.2 2280 and PCIe 3.0 x4. It also makes use of the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface, better known as NVMe.

Most SSDs still make use of the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) architecture, which was originally developed for spinning platter SATA hard drives back in 2004. While AHCI works fine for traditional hard drives, it was never designed for low latency NAND chips. As flash speeds have increased, AHCI has become a performance bottleneck. NVMe exploits both the PCIe bus and NAND flash memory to offer higher performance and lower latency.

In the case of the 512GB Samsung 950 Pro, the combination of NVMe, speedy V-NAND chips, and a triple core, eight-channel UBX controller has resulted in some eye-popping performance. Sequential read speeds top out at 2500MB/s, while sequential writes hit 1500MB/s. By comparison, Samsung's OEM-only SM951 AHCI drive—which is based on the same UBX controller, albeit paired with planar NAND—tops out at 2150MB/s sequential reads and 1500MB/s sequential writes.

Random read performance on the 512GB 950 Pro is up to 300K IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), with write speeds of up to 110K IOPS. Power tops out 5.7W on average, 7.0W in burst mode, and 1.7W at idle. The drive also features 512MB of DRAM memory, and support for 256-bit AES encryption. A future firmware update also promises to add TCG Opal support for Microsoft's eDrive standard.

Because the 950 Pro is a consumer drive—unlike the OEM-only SM951—Samsung is bundling it with its own proprietary NVMe driver, although, it will also be compatible with the standard driver available for Windows 7 and up. Both drives ship with a five year limited warranty covering up to 200 TBW (terabytes written) for the 256GB and 400 TBW on the 512GB, which is strangely less than 10 year warranty of the 850 Pro.