Samsung 970 Evo M.2 NVMe 250GB Review

Published by Luca Rocchi on 19.06.18
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With the 970 Evo, Samsung launches an NVMe-SSD for end users. The drive, which is lying in front of us in this case, performs extremely well pumping out up to 3400 MB/s sequentially reading and 1500 MB/s sequentially writing. This definitely makes us wonder how much of that horsepower is available in real life.






Specifications / Delivery


Model Samsung 970 Evo M.2 250 GB Samsung 970 Evo M.2 500 GB Samsung 970 Evo M.2 1 TB
Capacity 250 GB 500 GB 1 TB
Form Factor M.2 (2280) M.2 (2280) M.2 (2280)
Interface PCIe 3.0 x4 PCIe 3.0 x4 PCIe 3.0 x4
Protocol NVMe NVMe NVMe
Controller
  • Samsung Phoenix
  • ARM 5-Core
  • Samsung Phoenix
  • ARM 5-Core
  • Samsung Phoenix
  • ARM 5-Core
Memory
  • 3D V-NAND
  • 64 layer
  • 3D V-NAND
  • 64 layer
  • 3D V-NAND
  • 64 layer
DRAM 512MB LP DDR3 512MB LP DDR3 1GB LP DDR3
Throughput
  • 3400 MB/s sequential read
  • 1500 MB/s sequential write
  • 200'000 IOPS 4K random read
  • 350'000 IOPS 4K random write
  • 3400 MB/s sequential read
  • 2300 MB/s sequential write
  • 370'000 IOPS 4K random read
  • 450'000 IOPS 4K random write
  • 3400 MB/s sequential read
  • 2500 MB/s sequential write
  • 500'000 IOPS 4K random read
  • 450'000 IOPS 4K random write
Endurance 150 TBW 300 TBW 600 TBW
Power Consumption
  • 5.4 Watt active
  • 0.5 Watt idle
  • 5.7 Watt active
  • 0.5 Watt idle
  • 6.0 Watt active
  • 0.5 Watt idle
Warranty 5 Years 5 Years 5 Years
Price




Samsung has been amongst the first companies which launched an NVMe SSD for end users. NVMe or NVM Express stands for Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCI). These specs define how solid state drives are being accessed through the PCI Express bus and therefore directly communicate with the CPU. NVMe replaces AHCI in the case of SSDs and it brings quite a few advantages to the table. AHCI, or Advanced Host Controller Interface, was optimized for drives with low throughput and high latencies. Apart from that it could not deal with high parallelism, being limited to a queue depth of 32. NVMe on the other hand has been designed to leverage the benefits of SSD from ground up, which means it can deal perfectly with low latency and high throughput drives. Apart from that it supports another magnitude of parallelism, whereas the queue depth can reach up to 65536. Since SSDs are based on controllers, which usually feature between eight and ten channels, parallelism is a key factor in gaining more performance.

Having a closer look at the specs we see that Samsung claims the 250GB 970 Evo M.2 can reach up to 3400/1500MB/s sequential read/write speeds, which is simply a new level when it comes to the desktop market. Although the high level of performance and the good space available, this drive comes with a solid price. While the 250GB costs 88 Euro, the 500GB and 1TB models cost 160 and 320 Euro respectively. A closer look at this M.2 expansion card shows, Samsung is using their 5 core ARM controller in the Phoenix version as well as second generation V-NAND memory. Therefore 64 layers of NAND flash memory are being stacked. At the moment Samsung is selling the 250GB, 500GB and 1TB models. At a later stage, the 2 Terabyte drive is going to be available as well.


Page 1 - Introduction Page 5 - Iometer QD8 MB/s & QD16 MB/s
Page 2 - Preview Page 6 - Iometer QD32 MB/s & QD64 IOPS
Page 3 - Test Setup Page 7 - Price
Page 4 - Iometer QD1 MB/s & QD4 MB/s Page 8 - Conclusion




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