Samsung unveils 950 Pro SSD with V-NAND and NVMe, coming October and priced at $200 for 256GB, $350 for 512GB
Mark Walton / Ars Technica :
Context & Ripple Effects
The 950 Pro is the consumer-facing piece of a busy 2015 for Samsung's storage line: it had already pushed capacity with 2TB 850 Evo and 850 Pro drives in July and shown off a 16TB 2.5-inch SSD weeks ago. What is new here is the interface — pairing its own V-NAND with NVMe over PCIe brings server-class speed to a $200–$350 price point, ahead of an October ship date.
First-order effects
- Buyers of small-form-factor desktops and laptops get a native NVMe option at consumer prices, undercutting what SATA-bound drives could offer at the same capacity.
Second-order effects
- Rival drive makers face pressure to move their own consumer lines off SATA onto PCIe/NVMe — a path Seagate later took with its 10GBps NVMe drives on 16-lane PCIe slots, and one Samsung itself extended in 2016 with a 512GB NVMe SSD weighing just one gram.
Third-order effects
- If NVMe becomes the default consumer interface, the battleground shifts from raw gigabytes to controller and NAND efficiency — favoring vertically integrated players like Samsung that make their own flash.
The trend: Consumer SSDs are migrating from the SATA bottleneck to PCIe/NVMe, with flash makers using proprietary NAND as the lever to set the pace.