Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD Review
Samsung have been at the top of the SSD game for a while now, especially when the market made the jump to NVMe SSDs, where their 950, 960 and 970 Pro drives have really dominated their field. Of course, there’s also the EVO versions, which are a bit slower, but a bit cheaper too – and while never the cheapest on the market, often sell incredibly well.
Because of this, and likely a bit of limitation on the M.2 connection at this point – PCIe x4 being 32Gb/s means a theoretical maximum 4GB/s – although with overheads more like the 3.5GB/s we are seeing – just like the SATA 3 SSDs which had a 6GB/s connection, so theoretical maximum of 750MB/s, but never really achieved over about 600MB/s, the new 970 EVO PLUS drive is focusing more on reliability, and a few tricks to eek out as much performance as possible.
The drive uses the same 3 bit MLC V NAND flash as a few of their other models, with a quotes 3.5GB/s read and – for the 1TB model anyway – 3.3GB/s writes. I’ve got the 250GB model here, so it’s quoted at a slower 2.3GB/s instead. It does however feature a new version of their Phoenix controller, and either 512MB of LPDDR4 cache – for the 250GB and 500GB models, or 1GB for the 1TB version.
Endurance is also up, with the 1TB model boasting a 600TBW warranty support, with the expected lifetime being a bit over 1 Petabyte, which is impressive. The 250GB model I’ve got has a warranty limit of 150TBW, due to its smaller capacity.
They’ve also improved their “Intelligent TurboWrite” feature, which allows the drive to monitor the workload on it, and dynamically change the amount of SLC buffer it has available. By default it has 4GB free, but can add a further 9GB for larger file transfers. That’s for the 250GB model by the way, as the 1TB model has up to 42GB total available to it.
Anyway, that’s the spec, lets talk benchmarks and real world. First off is the usual synthetic tests. All of these show the drive roughly around 3.5GB/s reads – AS SSD being the usual outlier with only 3GB/s, as well as showing actually around 2.4GB/s writes, around 100MB/s faster than Samsung claims.
In my torture test, where I duplicate the GTA V game files on the drive, stressing reads and writes simultaneously, it initially performs well, peaking at over 1GB/s, but quickly falls off after only a few gigabytes of files transferred. This is a relatively weak performance compared to even the more budget friendly ADATA SX8200, but still not terribly slow.
If you are using this as a boot drive in a gaming PC, and have a few games on it for fast load times, it’ll be perfect for you. Pricing is still TBC but if it’s anything like the current 970 EVO, it’ll be definitely on the more expensive side of the market, but still not insane. If however you are looking for a caching drive, I’m not sure this is for you. While it has a great reliability figure for endurance, it’s performance didn’t blow me away. I’d also mention that while temps in my test machine were good – only 42°c under load, that was with a decent size heatsink on it, so without could be a lot closer to the 70°c thermal throttling temp.
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TechteamGB assumes no liability for damage, misuse or misunderstanding of the information contained in this video. Use this information at your own risk. TechteamGB cannot guarantee any particular result from the information contained in this video, and all information was presented as correct as of filming. TechteamGB accepts no liability for information being proven incorrect after the creation of the video, and all information should be taken as opinion and guidance, not fact. This video was not sponsored by anyone, and TechteamGB does not accept monetary – or non-monetary – benefits to alter opinions or results.
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