The SSD 960 Evo showed no faults throughout our testing back in 2016 and its price vs. performance ratio remains largely unparalleled, being even more affordable today at $200 for around 40 cents a gig for the 500GB version. Offering sequential reads and writes of 3,200MB/s and 1,800MB/s, the 960 Evo is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB versions, though the smaller drive will cut down on performance, so our buying recommendation exclusively applies to 500GB and larger variants.

Like the more expensive SSD 960 Pro, the 960 Evo is powered by Samsung's Polaris controller coupled with Samsung's 48-layer V-NAND. Although the 960 Evo has been outfitted with TLC memory instead of MLC, the impact on performance is relatively minor with sequential read speeds dropping from 3.5GB/s to 3.2GB/s and write throughput going from 2.1GB/s to 1.9GB/s. In other words, you'd be paying over 20% less for the 960 Evo and yet the impact on performance could be considerably less than that.