The Mainstream Phoenix Rises: Samsung's 970 EVO (500GB & 1TB) SSDs Reviewed
by Billy Tallis on April 24, 2018 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The peak performance of the Samsung 970 EVO on our Light test is record-setting, but that's only an improvement of 6% over the Samsung 960 PRO's average data rate—not a big enough difference to notice on such a light workload. When the test is run on a full drive, the 970 EVO loses more performance than most top drives, because it is one of the few TLC-based drives in that tier.
The average and 99th percentile latencies from the 970 EVO on the Light test are some of the best we've measured, still represent tiny improvements over Samsung's previous high-end SSDs.
The Samsung 970 EVO leads over other flash-based SSDs for both average read and write latency, but the differences are just a few microseconds and thus completely imperceptible.
The Samsung 970 EVO is the first drive to keep its 99th percentile write latency below 100µs whether or not the Light test is run on a full drive, showing that the 4-6GB static SLC cache is still quite useful even when the dynamically sized portion of the cache is unavailable. The 99th percentile read latency shows that Samsung has improved their full-drive QoS over the 960 EVO, but for the 500GB model in particular they still have room for improvement.
The energy usage of the Samsung 970 EVO is slightly higher than the PM981, putting the 970 EVO in last place for efficiency among flash-based SSDs. The energy usage of the 970 EVO doesn't show much variation between running the test on a full vs empty drive, despite the large performance differences between those scenarios.
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PeachNCream - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
That's a lot of "meh" in terms of performance for the high price.Samus - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
I agree. It's basically tied with the WD Black in real world performance, but the WD Black sells for $70 less (500GB) or 40% less. That's pretty ridiculous.Reppiks - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
The problem with Black is the naming, when I look in Danish shops they list 800MB/s writes so I presume thats an earlier generation? That makes it really hard to know what your buying when they dont have a WD Black 1gen, 2gen etcmoozooh - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
> The problem with Black is the namingThat's racist.™
jtd871 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
I seriously can't tell if you're trying to sound clever or infantile.peevee - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
He is succeeding at being funny. You have to be in the US context to understand why.azrael- - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link
You need to look specifically for "NVMe" as the new WD Black SSDs are postfixed "NVMe" instead of "PCIe". For instance, a search on the ProShop site yielded five drives for "wd black nvme" of which the three were postfixed "NVMe". These are the new ones and they are *considerably* more expensive. At least a 54% markup over the old versions.FullmetalTitan - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Not sure where you are getting those price differentials from. WD Black and 970 EVO MSRPs are matched for every shared capacity.peevee - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
newegg 1TB m.2 SSD prices:Crucial MX500 (SATA) $250
HP EX920 (NVMe PCIe x4) $360
Intel 760p (NVMe PCIe x4 )$400
WD Black (NVMe PCIe x4) $450
Samsung 970 EVO (NVMe PCIe x4) $600.
960 PRO $609.
Sams prices obviously need to CRASH before they make any sense.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx...
Samus - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link
https://camelcamelcamel.com/Black-512GB-Performanc...WD Black 512GB NVMe had regularly sold for $150 on sale. Until the Samsung price drops in May, the EVO 970 500GB never sold under $200, and was regularely $220-$230.
So my statement is 100% factual and correct as of the time or writing on April 25, and as of now:
"WD Black sells for $70 less (500GB) or 40% less"