Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB Review: Burly, Speedy NVMe Storage

Our Test Methods: Under each test condition, the SSDs tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and AHCI mode was enabled for the host drive.

The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing (when applicable), and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with the ATTO, PCMark, and CrystalDiskMark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing and Windows 10 Quiet Hours were enabled. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, waited several minutes for drive activity to settle, and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test. All of the drives featured here were tested with their own NVMe drivers installed where possible / available, the default Windows 10 NVMe driver was used when a proprietary driver was unavailable.

Also note, we have completely revamped our test bed, so the numbers shown in this review aren’t comparable to previous articles. All of the drives here have also been updated to their latest firmware and drivers where applicable.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor - Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Storage -

Intel Core i9-9900K Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master (Z390 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) Intel HD 630 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-2666 Integrated on board Corsair Force GT (OS Drive) Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus (2TB) Samsung SSD 970 EVO (1TB) Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus (1TB) WD Black SN750 Heatsink (1TB) Adata XPG SX8200 Pro (512GB) Asura Genesis Extreme (1TB)

OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Benchmarks -

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1809) Intel 10.1.17.86, iRST 17.0.0.1072 DirectX 12 IOMeter 1.1 HD Tune v5.70 ATTO v4.00.0f2 AS SSD CrystalDiskMark v6.0.2 x64 PCMark Storage Bench 2.0 SiSoftware SANDRA

IOMeter I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard storage benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our results with IOMeter appear to scale, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance. The access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workload, for example. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput with a given storage solution. In addition, there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; a custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access. Queue depths from 1 to 32 were tested, though keep in mind, most consumer workloads usually reside at low queue depths...

The Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB drive tracks right alongside the 1TB drive we previous evaluated, which puts it among the best performing drives we have tested to date.

Latency and bandwidth look good for the 2TB SSD 970 EVO Plus drive as well. The drive puts up some of the highest bandwidth scores and offered the best overall latency characteristics as well.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark Bring Your Translator: http://bit.ly/aRx11n