Samsung's Fastest SSD Reads at a Face-Melting 2,500 MBps

Samsung has just launched its latest SSD and it happens to be the fastest consumer drive it has ever made, with read speeds of up to 2,500 Mbps and write speed as fast as 1,500 Mbps. That is actually speedy.

The next-generation Samsung 950 Pro SSD is an update to its predecessor, the 850 Pro, and boy is it an upgrade: it reads four times faster and writes three times faster. It claims to offer a higher bandwidth and lower latency to process more data than SATA SSDs, thus ideal for professionals using highend PCs and workstations.

Industry insiders say such a dramatic jump in performance is in most part due to the use of what’s called a Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface rather than the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) that many SSDs continue to use. The problem with AHCI is that it is designed by Intel in 2004 for the old spinningplate HDDs and as a result it now presents a data bottleneck. The new SSDs will be available from October in 256GB and 512GB versions, at the price of $200 and $350 respectively.