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The 960 PRO comes in a small black and red box. While there aren't a lot of details on the front, the back of the box advertises some of the drive's key features including its V-NAND technology, NVMe interface and 5 year warranty. Inside, you'll find the SSD as well as a small installation guide and warranty statement.
Physical Features:
The 960 PRO uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 80.15 x 22.15 x 2.38 mm and tips the scales at a mere 8.3g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.
Like the SM961, PM961 and 960 EVO, the 960 PRO is equipped with Samsung's new Polaris controller. Optimized for NVMe-based SSDs, the Polaris is equipped with five processing cores. While four of the cores are used for flash management, the fifth is dedicated to processing data sent between the host system and the controller.
For the 512GB version of the 960 PRO, Samsung used their own 48-layer MLC V-NAND flash chips. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there are four 128GB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB. Instead of a separate memory chip for caching, the DRAM and Polaris controllers have been integrated into a single package, which allows more space for NAND.
