The Samsung SM961 was a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched on April 15th, 2016, that is no longer in production. It was available in capacities ranging from 128 GB to 1 TB. This page reports specifications for the 256 GB variant. With the rest of the system, the Samsung SM961 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 MLC NAND flash on the SM961, 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 SM961 is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 3,100 MB/s and 1,400 MB/s write; random IOPS reach up to 330K for reads and 280K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 159 USD. The warranty length is set to three years, which is above average, but shorter than the five years offered by many other vendors. The TBW rating for the Samsung SM961 256 GB is unknown.