Since the arrival of Intel's Z170 chipset, storage manufacturers have been producing numerous M.2 SSDs to replace the SATA-based SSD market which appears to have now plateaued. There are obvious benefits to NVMe over SATA ? the 550MB/s bottleneck has now been breached by utilising PCI Express Gen 3 x4 and on offer are transfer rates which can completely transform workflow for both the average user and workload professionals. High bandwidth and low latency is the name of the game here!

NVMe uses lower latency and can handle up to 64K queues and up 64K commands each while SATA and AHCI can only handle 1 queue and 32 commands each ? the benefits are clearly evident.

Samsung recently announced their new 960 PRO; the next NVMe SSD to supersede their renowned 950 PRO. This drive builds on the success of the 950 PRO delivering Samsung's 3rd generation V-NAND along with the new Polaris Controller. 960 PRO is available in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB editions and will be available to buy next month.