Samsung 970 EVO 2TB SSD Review

Samsung's 970 EVO comes in a compact black box with a large image of the drive on the front. On the top right hand side of the box we find a sticker displaying the drives capacity.

The rear of the box has a multilingual information panel giving the web address for more detailed warranty information. To the right of this is a reminder that the drive has a 5 year limited warranty.

The drive itself comes in a plastic shell for extra protection. This outer shell fits into another piece of plastic which is home to the installation/warranty guide.

 
The 970 EVO is built on a single sided M.2 2280 format PCB. The sticker on the rear of the drive has a built in copper layer to aid heat dissipation.

At one end of the PCB sits the Phoenix controller, while sitting at the other end of the PCB are two 64-layer 512GB V-NAND TLC NAND packages. In between the NAND and the controller there is a 2GB LPDDR4 DRAM IC to take care of caching duties.

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Samsung's SSD management utility goes by the name of Magician and is downloaded from Samsung's website. The latest v5.2 version brings support for the SSD 970 series. The latest version sees a number of improvements over the v5.1, including an alarm function for firmware or Magician updates, a USB boot solution for NVMe devices for using Secure Erase, updated performance benchmark and a text drag and copy function for the system compatibility page.

Magician allows you to do most maintenance jobs you may need to do with a SSD; updating firmware, optimise performance, adjust the Over Provisioning, enable data security (the drive supports AES 256-bit full disk encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0, and Encrypted Drive -IEEE1667 (MS eDrive ) ) and securely erase the drive. Magician also features a built in benchmark tool.

The one thing missing from Magician is any form of integrated data migration tool but you can download a separate data migration tool from Samsung's website.

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