Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus Review: Optimized For Speed

Performance Summary: The Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus drives we tested put up strong numbers across the board. They are among the fastest solid state drives we’ve tested, in terms of sequential transfers, especially sequential reads, where the drives compete across the board. Sequential writes are also good, so long as the transfer size doesn’t exceed the capacity of the Turbowrite cache. When the Turbowrite cache is exhausted, write performance drops off considerably -- this shouldn't be a problem for the vast majority of consumer workloads, however. Access times were also good with the 970 EVO Plus drives, they were among the best performers in the trace-based tests, and at low queue depths read performance is competitive, but they offer particularly strong writes.

Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus drives, with 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities will be available immediately, with prices starting at $89.99 ($0.35 per GiB) for the 250GB model, and $129.99 and $249.99 ($0.25 per GiB) for the 500GB and 1TB models, respectively. That cost per gigabyte puts the Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus among the more expensive M.2-based NVMe gumsticks currently on the market, and nearly double the price of more mainstream drives like the Crucial P1, which can be had for roughly $75 for a 500GB model at the moment.

Among the enthusiast-class drives on the market however, the SSD 970 EVO Plus is easily among the best options available, especially at its higher capacities. And while they carry a clear premium based on their strong all-around performance, they are not prohibitively more expensive either. If you’ve been shopping for a high-end SSD and want a drive that offers strong performance for the vast majority of consumer-class workloads, the Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus should definitely be on your short list.

Very Strong Performance High Endurance Long 5 Year Warranty Low Latency	Price Premium Long, Sustained Writes Will Saturate Turbowrite Cache