The Be Quiet! Silent Base 600 ATX Case Review

Be Quiet! might not be a widely known brand name in North America, but the German company is highly popular as a manufacturer of low-noise PC components in Europe. The company has been shyly making its way into the North American market and several of their products can now be found via North American e-tailers and retailers.

Introduction

As a company focused on providing low-noise solutions, Be Quiet! primarily became popular from producing and marketing fans, coolers and power supply units. Not so long ago however the company also diversified into one more segment of the market, that of PC cases. They currently __have two different cases, the Silent Base 600 and the Silent Base 800, with each of them available in six variants.

It is their more popular and cost effective Silent Base 600 that we are going to __have a closer look at this review. The Silent Base 600 is an ATX case of typical proportions, designed to provide good overall performance and flexibility combined with sound-dampening features. It is available in six different versions but they are all practically identical, with the end user having to choose between three faceplate trim colors (black, orange or silver) and a windowed or solid left side panel.  The sample that we received for the means of this review is the orange color variant with the windowed side panel.

Be Quiet! Silent Base 600
Motherboard Size		ATX, Micro-ATX, Mini-ITX
Drive Bays	External	3 × 5.25"
	Internal	3 × 3.5" (Front drives cage) 2 × 2.5" (Behind the motherboard tray) 1 × 2.5" (Front drives cage)
Cooling	Front	2 x 140 mm (one included)
	Rear	1 × 120 mm (included)
	Top	2 × 120 mm / 140 mm (optional)
	Side	1 × 120 mm (optional, solid panel version only)
	Bottom	1 × 120 mm / 140 mm (optional)
Radiator Support	Front	Up to 120 mm or 240 mm
	Rear	Up to 120 mm
	Top	Up to 240 mm
	Side	-
	Bottom	-
I/O Port		2× USB 3.0, 2× USB 2.0, 1× Headphone, 1× Mic
Power Supply Size		ATX
Clearances	HSF	167 mm
	PSU	160/290 mm (with/without a bottom fan)
	GPU	295/410 mm (with/without a drive's cage)
Dimensions		495 mm × 230 mm × 493 mm 19.49 in × 9.06 in × 19.41 in
Prominent Features		· Simple mounting and tool-free fitting of drives · Air intake filters that are easily accessed for cleaning · Space for water cooling radiators · Two pre-installed Pure Wings 2 fans feature nine airflow-optimized fan blades and are decoupled from the case to circulate air with a minimum of vibration · Side panel with adjustable vent that can be closed for silent operation, partially open for increased air intake or open with an additional fan for higher cooling performance · Cable management is supported with space for organizing cables, silicone rubber grommets, and pass-throughs
Price		$127

Buy Be Quiet Silent Base 600 on Amazon.com

Packaging & Bundle

Be Quiet! Supplies the Silent Base 600 in a simple brown cardboard box. The artwork is monochromic and based on a simple schematic of the case itself. The box however is sturdy and the case inside it is well protected between thick Styrofoam slabs, providing excellent shipping protection.

The company kept the bundled items down to a minimum. Along with the case we received only the necessary mounting hardware and screws, the required silicone rails for the installation of 3.5" devices, just four cable ties and a very undetailed manual that could have been more detailed. 

Russia blocks access to LinkedIn over foreign-held data Microsoft bets heavily on LinkedIn to secure its place in a world after Windows

Russia has blocked access to LinkedIn after the social network became the first major foreign site to be found in violation of a law demanding that the data of Russian users is stored on Russian territory.

The law was passed two years ago, and this is the first time it has been used against a major foreign company. Giants such as Facebook and Twitter __have so far resisted moving their servers to Russia despite pressure from the authorities.

A court ruling last week found LinkedIn in violation of the law, and Russia’s communication watchdog, Roskomnadzor, said on Thursday that access to the site would be blocked.

Though the site’s homepage was still working for some users on Thursday afternoon, a spokeswoman for LinkedIn said it had started to hear from members in Russia who were no longer able to access the site.

“Roskomnadzor’s action to block LinkedIn denies access to the millions of members we __have in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their businesses,” the spokeswoman said.

The website, which has headquarters in the US, has more than 6 million registered users in Russia. The network’s management said it had asked Roskomnadzor for a meeting, which is likely to take place in the coming weeks.

Russian politicians have suggested the purpose of the law is to protect Russian citizens from having their personal data abused by foreign governments. However, critics have said it is merely a way for the Russian security services to access the data themselves.

Many other foreign companies are believed to have quietly complied with the Kremlin’s demands, but Twitter, Google and Facebook have not done so yet.

The Kremlin said on Thursday that Roskomnadzor’s order was legal and Vladimir Putin did not plan to interfere in the case. Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the president, said the Kremlin was not worried the case would stir fears about censorship. “There are no such concerns,” he said.

Andrei Soldatov, co-author of a book about the Russian internet, said targeting LinkedIn could be a first step that would avoid the controversy of going after a real giant such as Facebook.

“They need some success stories to show that it can work. They saw LinkedIn as relatively easy prey, in comparison with bigger companies, and, added to that, they just secured full cooperation with Microsoft,” Soldatov said.

Microsoft agreed a deal to purchase LinkedIn earlier this year.

A statement on Roskomnadzor’s website this week said its head, Alexander Zharov, had held a meeting in Moscow with a Microsoft vice-president, Steve Crown. Microsoft presented the watchdog with a report on its work relocating user data to Russia, and “the issue is now closed”, said Zharov, suggesting Microsoft had agreed to move servers to Russia.

In the new robopolitics, social media has left newspapers for dead

The debate about post-fact politics misses the point. The Brexit and Trump campaigns deliberately exploited the crisis of journalism and the rise of social media. We are witnessing the birth of robopolitics: the mechanised reproduction of campaign messages by campaign machines that bypass normal journalistic verification.

Internet campaigning is smart. Why waste money spraying your message all over the country in the hope that it somehow splashes those that will count? The superior targeting of social media campaigns is why the UK ad revenue of Google and Facebook now exceeds that of all newspapers in the country combined. It is also why all the main campaigns – but particularly the pro-Brexit campaign – embraced social media.

LSE researchers recently interviewed Leave.EU campaign director Andy Wigmore. He described the moment when they realised social media was the key. “Originally we were going to spend £5-10m on [newspaper] advertising. We were going to do a TV advert, we were going to do bulletins, posters you name it, flyers. But we discovered quite quickly that the cheapest and most effective way we had of communicating a message was social media. We told the agency we were going to plough everything into social media.”

Mechanised, data-driven robo-campaigns are not necessarily concerned with persuading everybody, or even the mainstream, of the virtue of the proposal under consideration. They start with the outcome – in this case increasing the number of votes to leave the EU among groups likely to vote – and work back from that. Messages were tested for their ability to motivate people to vote. This explains why messages that were subsequently proved to be entirely untrue – such as the claim that leaving the EU would recoup £350m a week to spend on the health service – were doggedly repeated by the campaign.

One key difference between this new mode of campaigning and the “spin” of the past is that the relationship of dependence between journalism and political campaigns has been upended. There is no filter. It didn’t matter that journalists “revealed” that claims were untrue or crazy. Campaigners used the controversy to engage directly with electors via social media, shrugging off the questions of sceptical journalists.

Another development is targeting and message selection. Politicians __have always followed the maxim “know your audience”, and adjusted their talks for whomever was present, but a messaging machine driven by ever more finely grained knowledge of the audience tunes “dog-whistle” politics to new heights. Each of the Brexit campaigns employed message-targeting to ensure effectiveness. The ground war in the campaign was in many ways a battle of the databases.

Messages are delivered by increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence. The prototype is the Twitter bot, which constructs profiles of followers and targets tweets to selected audiences sometimes through paid promotion and sometimes through careful planning, timing and use of hashtags. Less visible are the algorithms that determine which messages – you will almost certainly not receive the same ones as your neighbours – appear on your Facebook timeline, Twitter feed or Google search page based on a complex melding of rules, payment and data based on your previous activity. Ultimately, each of the campaigns became bots, testing messages for effectiveness and then – without the intervention of conscience, fact or ideology, deploying them in the most cost-effective way.

The truth is, newspapers in most parts of the world are desperate. They were always vulnerable to populist instrumentalisation: it is the transgressive that sells papers, and the Farage/Trump play was to push the boundaries of propriety in part because what is outrageous is newsworthy, and thus guarantees free coverage. But the old populist contrarianism was a pact between the media and the populist. Robopolitics involves the mainstream media briefly, but then discards them.

Campaigners gleefully celebrate the end of the authoritative filter of journalism. As Wigmore says: “It didn’t matter what was said in the press. The more critical they were of us when we published these articles to our social media, the more numbers we got. So it occurred to us that actually Trump was on to something because the more outrageous he was, the more air time he got, the more air time he got the more outrageous he was … We are now anti-establishment full throttle.”

The populist revolutions of 2016 were caused by inequality and a corresponding sense of anger and worthlessness, not by the media. But understanding the precarious state of the media does help us understand the “post-fact” populist form they __have taken.

Gab: alt-right's social media alternative attracts users banned from Twitter Clickbait scoops and an engaged alt-right: everything to know about Breitbart News We need to talk about the online radicalisation of young, white men | Abi Wilkinson The alt-right thrives in opposition. What happens now it's the establishment?

Scroll down the “popular” posts on Gab, the social network whose logo is not a blue bird, but a Pepe frog, and you’ll get a different take on the election.

The service was founded in August, following the high-profile banning of Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter for harassment. Looking like a cleanly designed hybrid of Twitter and Reddit, it allows users to post updates without character limits, with memes, links and gifs. It appears to __have had an influx of users in recent days.

Those who __have been able to get in – reportedly the service currently has tens of thousands of people on its waiting list – will see that many of the most read and upvoted content comes from alt-right accounts that have long since been bounced from Twitter. As a result, spending time on Gab feels like hanging out with exiled ghosts.

Self-described “free speech activist” and alt-right influencer @ricky_vaughn99 was kicked off Twitter weeks back. A series of attempted resurrections with alternative accounts also failed. But he is alive and well on Gab.

He got lots of upvotes when he gabbed:

Clickbait failed to get The Cunt elected. George Soros and other billionaires will cut funding for clickbait. Big journalistic layoffs are on the way!”

The service has had a boost in the last few days. That appears to have a direct relationship to the fact that since the election, Twitter has applied the ban-hammer to a number of prominent alt-right accounts.

At the Atlantic yesterday, conservative commentator David Frum wrote that this was a bad idea. He pointed out that there was no evidence of harassment from at least some of the banned accounts, and argued that “the right way to deal with social media’s neo-Nazis is not by taking away their platforms, but by taking away their audiences”.

There’s something compelling about that argument when one logs into Gab. What use are bans in an era when the alt-right can go ahead and create, or adopt, their own platforms?

The trending topics indicating a strong presence from that camp: #MAGA (Make America Great Again), #PresidentTrump and #AltRight. If you burrow into them you’ll see the same memes, IQ charts and pseudo-scientific maps of racial attributes that alt-right accounts still spread on Twitter.

Gab founder and CEO of the service, Andrew Torba, insisted in a “gab” that “we welcome everyone and always will”. But so far, you need to look pretty hard to find accounts not posting a pro-Trump line.

Torba also says that it is not “Twitter for racists”. But there is no shortage of racially charged material to be found there.

Under the #SpeakFreely topic this morning, an account called European Americans posted:

Mexico owes USA untold $TRILLIONS for negatively impacting our socioeconomic health. How will they pay? Take the land, President Trump.”

Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones’s offsider at Infowars, appeared to acknowledge the political homogeneity of the site when he gabbed:

Now that Twitter is purging everyone, I think it’s important for Gab to branch out and attract leftists so we’re not just preaching to the choir.”

A favored topic in recent days is the alleged censoriousness of Twitter, combined with the hope that Gab will provide a new sanctuary for an ideology that Twitter appears to be moving against. (The Guardian contacted Twitter to confirm whether there was a push against alt-right accounts, but they did not respond before deadline).

The man who coined the term “alt-right” to describe his own ideology, Richard Spencer, had his personal account suspended from Twitter on Tuesday, along with that of his far-right thinktank, the National Policy Institute.

He joined Gab a month ago, but has begun posting regularly in the last 48 hours.

One of his posts yesterday read:

My impression of Gab is that it’s a better platform than Twitter (in terms of software). Obviously, the big issue is the ‘network effect,’ so we’ll see what happens. I’m hopeful.”

As of last night, he was listed as one of 10 “who to follow” accounts on Gab’s “popular” page, along with other alt-right luminaries – like longstanding rightwing noise machine Ann Coulter, and Paul Joseph Watson.

Another in that list was fellow Twitter exile Pax Dickinson, who you may remember as the man who was forced to resign as Business Insider’s CTO over a series of misogynist tweets.

He has since emerged as CTO of WeSearchr, a company he founded with notorious rightwing journalist Chuck C Johnson, which crowdsources bounties for tabloid exposés on progressives, moderate conservatives and media figures.

Yesterday, he was talking about his Twitter ban as a kind of victory.

The great purge is upon us. But Twitter could have purged the #AltRight BEFORE we memed a President into the White House. They didn’t because they never believed it was possible.”

On Thursday, he doubled down on the triumphalism.

The left wing has asserted full control of Twitter now, so the right wing will just have to make do with #Gab, #WeSearchr, Breitbart, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House. #MAGA”

Meanwhile Torba is ecstatic. Like Dickinson, he’s a pro-Trump Silicon Valley identity whose views and behavior have put him offside with some big players.

Before Gab, he founded a social media ad automator. But just last week, he was banned from startup incubator Y Combinator after the organization alleged that he spoke in “a threatening, harassing way” to other members on Facebook in a succession of discussions where he supported Trump.

But on Gab this Tuesday, he was celebrating the service’s newfound success: “Today has been Gab’s biggest day yet. Time to upgrade our hosting. :)”

Thursday morning, he posted a gif of a man laughing with the caption:

It may be that Gab becomes an online sanctuary for the far right. It’s not clear whether anyone else will join the party. The question then will be: will isolation in such a bubble simply intensify and normalize alt-right views?

Getting to grips with post-truth politics

While the internet and social media can lead to the rapid spread of falsehoods and dubious claims, they can also be used to check quickly such claims and expose lies (Trump and Brexit herald a brave new word: post-truth, 16 November). Would it not be possible to extend the powers of the Electoral Commission so that it can disqualify a candidate who persistently tells untruths and makes questionable claims that cannot be verified? This would not be a challenge to free speech as it would not stop people expressing opinions. But if they followed up these opinions with alleged facts that they could not verify, then they would be required to issue a withdrawal of the claims, with equal prominence to the way they were first stated. For example, if they were made in an election leaflet, then the candidate would be obliged to issue a new leaflet to deliver to the same households that received the originals, stating which facts were untrue or unverifiable. Candidates would then need to be more guarded in what they say.
Chris Jager
Malmesbury, Wiltshire

• One of the most damaging outcomes of the so-called educational reforms of the past 30 years has been the reduction in the curriculum of state schools of learning and experiences that help pupils to differentiate between fact and opinions, and to know how to recognise, challenge and check out biased views. This aspect is more important than ever since young people are now bombarded by messages from social media as well as from television, newspapers and radio. In order to protect our democracy, schools must be encouraged to help their students to understand, for example, the vested interests of the owners and users of all types of media; and to investigate the claims and promises made by politicians.
John Gaskin
Driffield, East Yorkshire

• Your article on the Oxford Dictionaries inadvertently reveals one of the ways in which post-truth occurs. You quote their definition of another new word, “alt-right”, characterised by the “use of social media to disseminate deliberately controversial content”.

What is meant by “deliberately controversial content” is misogyny, racism, deliberate lies, contempt for the poor and vulnerable, etc. This is not “controversial”; it is unethical and disgraceful. “Post-truth” has become possible at least partly because of this curious cult of neutrality by the members of the media who, in old-fashioned “truth”, believe in decency and know it matters. It’s very worrying because it gives the impression to the young and the wavering that “the best lack all conviction”. And it played a very large part in Donald Trump’s victory. It meant that even decent media such as the Guardian could almost never simply praise Hillary Clinton as the only serious and responsible candidate in the election, but almost invariably used up the available space informing us she was “unpopular” – a condition that the Guardian should __have been setting out to reverse by reporting her actual merits.

This happens repeatedly – with Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour party, with the Brexit vote, etc, and now with Trump – and it constitutes a constant and very damaging appeasement of the powers of darkness, who respond as we should by now __have learned to expect.
David Black
London

• George Orwell’s Newspeak has at last made it to the top table. It took 32 years; how long will it take the totalitarianism to follow? “Alt-right” makes fascism respectable, even excitingly modern, evocative of the computer keyboard.

Oxford Dictionaries don’t seem to have questioned the etymology of post-truth: “post-” means “after-”, but post-truth is not after-truth, it’s anti-truth. Newt Gingrich, whose alt-right ambitions will soon be let off the leash, says that getting Mexico to pay for The Wall is a non-starter but “a great campaign device”, like Brexit’s fictitious £350m a week for the NHS, or Donald Trump’s promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Suddenly “very stupid” Barack Obama is “a very good man”, and “crooked” Hillary Clinton “couldn’t have been nicer”.

Overt deceit to get votes is now respectable. Let’s hope it won’t be too long before those who are taken in by post-truth see it for what it is: lies from those who expect our trust.
Richard O’Brien
Highbridge, Somerset

• There is an unwilling collaborator in the era of post-truth politics, a self-loathing political class that lacks the confidence to tackle the lies propagated by the extreme right (Notebook, 17 November). Recent successes of the populist right seem to have left them in a state of shock, so much so that they can only murmur assent to the government’s populist EU exit strategy, an assent given with only the weakest of reservations. It is a rewriting of constitutional practice in which the role of the House of Commons changes from one of scrutiny to advice. There seems to be an absence of Churchill-like figures in the Commons who would fight to retain its constitutional right to hold the government to account. MPs now seem to accept that there role is at the bottom of the political food chain, giving precedence in policy making to every powerful extra parliamentary pressure group that shouts loud enough.
Derrick Joad
Leeds

• Hannah Jane Parkinson writes how fake news won the White House for Donald Trump (Opinion, 15 November) but haven’t the right everywhere always been able to tell lies far better than the left can tell the truth?
Gren Gaskell
Malvern, Worcestershire

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

Elon Musk wants to cover the world wth internet from space

The Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, is planning to put more than 4,000 satellites in orbit in order to blanket the Earth with internet access.

SpaceX, the privateer space company led by Musk, is requesting permission from the US government to operate a massive network of 4,425 satellites - plus “in-orbit spares” - to provide high-speed, global internet coverage.

Documents filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Tuesday propose an initial launch of 800 satellites to create an orbiting digital communications array to cover the US, including Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

In the filing, SpaceX said: “The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, government and professional users worldwide.”

Such a system would provide a space-based alternative to cable, fiber-optics and the other terrestrial internet access currently available.

SpaceX is not the first to propose such a system. Similar internet-via-satellite networks are under development by privately owned OneWeb and by Boeing, while a $200m satellite leased by Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, which has a similar goal of providing global internet access, was destroyed in an explosion of the SpaceX launch vehicle contracted to send it into orbit.

Each satellite SpaceX proposes to put into orbit, without its solar panels extended, is the size of an average car, measuring 4m by 1.8 by 1.2m and weighing 386kg. SpaceX has not set a date for the satellite launches, but said that they would orbit in a range between 714 miles and 823 miles above the Earth.

Musk said in January 2015 that the plan would cost at least $10bn.

It gained $1bn in funding from Google for the project. Google has been attempting to perform a similar feat, blanketing the globe in internet access, using high-altitude balloons. Facebook’s other internet initiatives __have revolved around the use of high-altitude solar-powered drones.

SpaceX operates a satellite launching business, with contracts with Nasa for supplying the International Space Station - the first privateer space firm to do so. But its rocket launches __have been on hiatus since 1 September following the Falcon 9 booster explosion.

The company hopes to resume launch operations next month.

• SpaceX founder Elon Musk plans to get humans to Mars in six years
  

The Samsung 960 EVO (1TB) Review

Last month the Samsung 960 Pro broke most of the performance records for a consumer SSD and often by a surprisingly large margin. But as impressive as it was to see the combination of high capacity and high performance in such a small package, the 2TB 960 Pro we reviewed is too expensive to be a realistic option for most enthusiasts.

Enter the Samsung 960 EVO. With the same powerful SSD controller used on the 960 Pro but much cheaper TLC 3D NAND, the 960 EVO is far more affordable but promises similar peak performance. Despite being Samsung's low-end M.2 PCIe option, the 960 EVO is aiming to outperform last year's 950 Pro and the current flagship PCIe SSDs from Samsung's competitors.

Samsung 960 EVO Specifications Comparison
	960 EVO 1TB	960 EVO 500GB	960 EVO 250GB	950 PRO 512GB	950 PRO 256GB
Form Factor	single-sided M.2 2280			single-sided M.2 2280
Controller	Samsung Polaris			Samsung UBX
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x4
NAND	Samsung 48-layer 256Gb TLC V-NAND			Samsung 32-layer 128Gbit MLC V-NAND
SLC Cache Size	42GB	22 GB	13GB	N/A
Sequential Read	3200 MB/s	3200 MB/s	3200 MB/s	2500 MB/s	2200 MB/s
Sequential Write (SLC Cache)	1900 MB/s	1800 MB/s	1500 MB/s	1500 MB/s	900 MB/s
Sequential Write (sustained)	1200 MB/s	600 MB/s	300 MB/s	N/A	N/A
4KB Random Read (QD32)	380k IOPS	330k IOPS	330k IOPS	300k IOPS	270k IOPS
4KB Random Write (QD32)	360k IOPS	330k IOPS	300k IOPS	110k IOPS	85k IOPS
Power	5.7W (average)	5.4W (average)	5.3W (average)	7.0W (burst) 5.7W (average) 1.7W (idle)	6.4W (burst) 5.1 (average) 1.7W (idle)
Endurance	400TB	200TB	100TB	400TB	200TB
Warranty	3 Year			5 Year
Launch MSRP	$479.99	$249.99	$129.88	$350	$200

The 960 EVO is not the first M.2 PCIe SSD to use TLC NAND. Samsung's OEM product line has the PM951 and PM961, using the same controllers as the 950 Pro and 960 Pro respectively. Intel has also shipped the 600p as their first 3D NAND SSD for the consumer market, but the Silicon Motion controller it uses is a far cry from the monster of a controller used in their flagship SSD 750.

As a more cost-focused product than the 960 Pro, the 960 EVO has a lower range of capacity options. With a maximum capacity of 1TB, the 960 EVO does not need to use the controller+DRAM package on package stacking that was necessary for the 2TB 960 Pro to be a single-sided M.2 module. As is normal for Samsung's EVO lines, the usable capacities are a bit smaller, with the 1TB EVO being 1000GB instead of 1024GB.

Some of the extra spare area reserved is used for the SLC write cache, which Samsung is now branding as 'Intelligent TurboWrite'. Where the 850 EVO's TurboWrite cache was 3-12GB depending on drive capacity, the 960 EVO has 4-6GB of guaranteed cache plus 9-36GB of dynamic cache when the drive has sufficient free space. Having a cache that is several times larger will greatly expand the range of workloads that can fit in the cache, and will help the 960 EVO make the best of its PCIe 3.0 x4 interface that is much faster than SATA.

Spot the copper-backed heat spreader label underneath

The 960 EVO includes all of the thermal management measures of the 960 Pro, including the copper-backed heat spreading label, a very power-efficient controller and a well-tuned thermal throttling implementation. TLC NAND has been shown to be, in general, slower and more power-hungry than MLC NAND so the 960 EVO is more susceptible to thermal throttling than the 960 Pro, but Samsung claims it is still less of a problem than it was for the 950 Pro, which means that virtually all real-world usage scenarios will not trigger throttling.

The warranty period for the 960 EVO is three years instead of the five enjoyed by the 850 EVO and both generations of MLC-based PCIe SSDs. The drive write endurance rating is also only half that of the 960 and 950 Pros, but 100TB for a 250GB drive is a sufficient amount.

For this review, Samsung provided an advance copy of their new NVMe driver version 2.0 to support the 960 Pro and 960 EVO as well as the 950 Pro. The 960 EVO was tested with Samsung's driver and the 960 Pro was also re-tested using this driver instead of Microsoft's driver built in to Windows. The results for the 950 Pro are still from version 1.0 of Samsung's NVMe driver. The next major release of Samsung's Magician software is still not quite ready, so exploration of encryption capabilities and other new features will __have to wait. Samsung expects to release Magician 5 by the end of the month.

Samsung provided a 250GB 960 EVO and a 1TB 960 EVO for this review. The 250GB 960 EVO failed relatively early in the testing process, after completing a few of the IOmeter tests and while it was about 10% of the way through being filled to prepare for the next test. We are working with Samsung to determine the cause of the failure but due to the short time available we __have not been able to reach a conclusion as of press time. These review units are technically preproduction samples and thus their failure rates are probably not indicative of the mass-market reliability. SSD deaths are nothing new at AnandTech, and in the past some of them have been our fault rather than due to defective goods. But regardless of what triggered this failure, there is a bright side: our testing usually doesn't tell us anything about the end-of-life behavior of SSDs. If our 250GB 960 EVO has indeed failed unrecoverably, it did so gracefully: the drive entered a read-only state during the fill process, which caused IOmeter to hang, but the data already written is still accessible and the drive still reports its SMART indicators and error codes. Aside from refusing to accept write or secure erase commands, the only symptom of the drive's failure is higher than normal idle power consumption.

For this review, the 1TB 960 EVO will be compared to the 2TB 960 Pro, last year's 950 Pro, and the current flagship NVMe drives from Intel and Toshiba (OCZ). For context, results from several 1TB SATA SSDs are also included. As always, our Bench tool can be used to compare against any other drive in our database of test results.

AnandTech 2015 SSD Test System
CPU	Intel Core i7-4770K running at 3.5GHz (Turbo & EIST enabled, C-states disabled)
Motherboard	ASUS Z97 Pro (BIOS 2701)
Chipset	Intel Z97
Memory	Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1866 2x8GB (9-10-9-27 2T)
Graphics	Intel HD Graphics 4600
Desktop Resolution	1920 x 1200
OS	Windows 8.1 x64

• Thanks to Intel for the Core i7-4770K CPU
• Thanks to ASUS for the Z97 Deluxe motherboard
• Thanks to Corsair for the Vengeance 16GB DDR3-1866 DRAM kit, RM750 power supply, Carbide 200R case, and Hydro H60 CPU cooler