Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB Review

The 970 EVO Plus sees the introduction of Samsung's latest generation of NAND, its 5th gen design, which increases the layer count of their 3-bit MLC V-NAND (TLC V-NAND) from the 64-layer of the fourth generation to 9*-layer for this new memory. Unusually for Samsung, they haven't said how many layers the NAND uses, but it's a pretty safe assumption to believe it is 96-layer.

A combination of shiny new NAND and firmware improvements in the Samsung Phoenix controller, sees the 970 EVO Plus get some decent performance lifts over the previous generation SSD970 EVO. Samsung quotes Sequential read/writes for the 1TB drive as up to 3,500MB/s and 3,300MB/s respectively, which is a 100MB/s increase for reads over the 1TB 970 EVO, but a much more impressive 800MB/s increase in writes.

We could confirm the official figures with our sequential tests, the review drive peaking at 3,618MB/s for reads and 3,423MB/s for writes.

Random performance has also been improved with the new NAND and updates within the controller. At a QD of 1, the 1TB SSD970 EVO Plus is rated at up to 19,000 IOPS and 60,000 IOPS for reads/writes respectively, a rise of 4,000 IOPS for reads and 10,000 IOPS for writes over the 1TB 970 EVO.

At a much deeper queue depth of 32, the SSD970 EVO Plus is rated at 600,000 IOPS for reads, and increase of 100,000 IOPS over the previous generation drive with writes up from 450,000 IOPS to 550,000 IOPS. With our 4K tests we couldn't get close to those maximum figures. However, the new drive comfortably outpaced the older drive in all bar one of our 4K queue depth tests.

The 970 EVO Plus also uses the company's TurboWrite technology to aid write performance. TurboWrite basically uses a portion of the NAND as an SLC write buffer to boost write performance. The 1TB drive has a default TurboWrite region of 6GB but if the drive is being asked to write more than 6GB, the 1TB 970 EVO Plus can use up to 36GB of dynamic SLC buffer to give a total SLC buffer of 42GB. This dynamic SLC buffer takes advantage of idle capacity so will not work if there isn't enough free space.

Samsung's SSD970 EVO drive has been a popular and fast performing drive ever since its launch but recently it has been out performed by newer drives to the market segment like Corsair's Force MP510 and in particular WD's latest Black SN750 drive. By using the latest NAND technology, Samsung has given the 970 EVO Plus the ability to redress the balance.

We found the 1TB Samsung SSD970 Plus on Overclockers UK for £239.99 (inc VAT) HERE

Pros

• 9*-layer V-NAND technology.
• Overall Performance.
• 5 year warranty.

Cons

• We couldn’t match Samsung’s quoted maximum 4K random figures.

KitGuru says: Samsung's 970 EVO was a very successful and popular drive and now it has been given a new lease of life with the latest NAND technology in the form of the 970 EVO Plus. It is safe to say the new NAND gives it a healthy performance boost over the previous generation drive.

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