The Samsung 960 EVO was a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched in October 2016, that is no longer in production. It was available in capacities ranging from 250 GB to 1 TB. This page reports specifications for the 500 GB variant. With the rest of the system, the Samsung 960 EVO interfaces using a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the Polaris (S4LP077X01-8030) from Samsung, a DRAM cache chip is available. Samsung has installed 48-layer TLC NAND flash on the 960 EVO, the flash chips are made by Samsung. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are processed more quickly. The cache is sized at 22 GB, once it is full, writes complete at 600 MB/s. The 960 EVO is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 3,200 MB/s and 1,800 MB/s write; random IOPS reach up to 330K for reads and 330K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 250 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Samsung guarantees an endurance rating of 200 TBW, a relatively low value compared to other SSDs.