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 |
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| Memory |
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| DRAM | 512MB LP DDR3 | 512MB LP DDR3 | 1GB LP DDR3 |
| Throughput |
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| Endurance | 150 TBW | 300 TBW | 600 TBW |
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| 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.
Impressions
Test Setup
| Motherboard |
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| Memory |
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| M.2 SSDs |
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| Benchmarks | Benchmarks
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| PSU |
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Iometer QD1 MB/s QD4 MB/s
Queue Depth 1
Queue Depth 4
Iometer QD8 MB/s QD16 MB/s
Queue Depth 8
Queue Depth 16
Iometer QD32 MB/s QD64 MB/s
Queue Depth 32
Queue Depth 64
Price
| ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 PCIe add-in-card | |
| Corsair Neutron NX500 - 400GB | |
| Intel SSD 600p M2 NVMe - 256GB | |
| Intel SSD 750 - 1.2TB | |
| Kingston HyperX Predator - 480GB | |
| Patriot Hellfire M2 - 480GB | |
| Plextor M6e - 256GB | |
| Samsung 950PRO - 512GB | |
| Samsung 960EVO - 500GB | |
| Samsung 970EVO - 250GB | |
| Samsung 960PRO - 1TB | |
| Toshiba OCZ RD400 - 512GB | |
| Western Digital WD Blue - 250GB |
Conclusion
Announcement: Despite the circumstance that the rating of a product is based on as many objective facts as possible there are factors which can have an influence on a rating after publication. Every author may perceive data differently over time whereas one possible reason for example is a deeper background knowledge or understanding of certain processes. Certain unforeseen market conditions as well as changes have the potential to render a decision made at a certain point in time obsolete.
With their 970 Evo M.2 series Samsung created a new SSD, which addresses enthusiasts and professionals. All new NVMe drives these days simply raise the bar in terms of performance to another level and bring the entire consumer market big step forward. Throughput rates in the region of 3'400 MB/s are about seven times as much then what’s achievable with SATA-III, which puts these NVMe drives in a completely different league. In terms of raw performance our test drive was able to score 730 MB/s sequential write and 2'073 MB/s sequential read throughput. When it comes to 4K IOPS we measured 352'437 IOPS regarding random read and 231'611 regarding random write. The performance of this drive is very good.
Today the 970 Evo M.2 is available with 250 Gigabyte, 500 Gigabyte and 1 Terabyte capacity. The 250 Gigabyte model costs 88 Euro, the 500 Gigabyte M.2 stick sells at 160 Euro and the 1 Terabyte model costs 320 Euro. If compared to SATA-III drives, those drives are definitely not cheap but considering what you get the price is adequate. The performance is just mindblowing and the whole NVMe standard helps pushing the boundaries of how fast SSDs can be. Should you be an enthusiast or a professional looking for a fast M.2 drive, then we can recommend these drives without a shadow of a doubt.
