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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
68 Comments
View All Comments
jkresh - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
is a review of the HP EX920 coming?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Yep, I have a sample of that on hand. I haven't tested it yet so it'll be a few weeks while I run it and several other drives through the post-Meltdown/Spectre patched testbed.Luckz - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
You write that you use Windows drivers instead of manufacturer ones, but elsewhere I hear complaints that the PM981 isn't a very useful buy because it requires drivers that aren't even available to the public, only to OEMs. Wouldn't it make sense to also try these with Samsung drivers especially if they're being compared to the PM981 all the time?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
The PM981 doesn't require any special drivers. It's just another standard NVMe SSD.HStewart - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
I am curious what kind of performance would I see replacing the Hyrix 512G in my Dell XPS 15 2in1 with a 1G or possible 2G in a year.Drazick - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Why do we need M.2 in desktop computer?Why should we live with this thermal compromise?
We want SATA Express / U2 drives.
Cooe - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Yuck and yuck. SATA Express is 1/2 the speed, and a completely stillborn interface, and the cable dependant huge waste of space 2.5" U2 makes next to no sense outside the data center. The M.2 form factor has countless innateadvantages over both those and any of it's potential thermal issues are easy & cheap to solve if you're particular setup happens to be vulnerable to their occurrence.
Not only have Samsung's copper heatsink labels reduced the problem significantly w/o any user action, but most good current motherboards have included M.2 heatsinks and even for those that don't, they can be purchased online for ridiculously cheap.
Now find me something braindead simple to install & use for just a couple $ that can make SATA Express twice as fast and actually used in drives, or make U.2 cableless and a fraction of a standard 2.5" drive's size. There isn't any.
medoogalaxy - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
superpower ssdshatteredx - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Which is more important for “snappiness,” 4K random qd1 read or write?sjprg2 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Just because I hate the sata cables I now have all M.2 Samsungs installed either in the M.2 slots or on the PCIE plugin adapters. This also allows all of the trays to be removed from the chassis letting the front panel fans blow straight onto the motherboard and plugins.