Samsung has been one of the more go-to brands for mainstream NVMe SSDs for tech enthusiasts, hardcore gamers, and professionals. They equipped their SSDs with the V5 flash, which gives a nice boost in performance of up to 3.5 GB/s of sequential read. Along with their 5-year warranty, and up to 1,200 TBW of endurance, the 970 EVO plus is one of the fastest SSDs we’ve seen in the market today.
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Samsung’s NVMe SSDs feature an optional driver download that helps boost performance over the Windows NVMe driver by a little. This assists in ensuring compatibility with older Windows operating systems, like Windows 7.
Samsung 970 Evo Plus Design
The Samsung 970 Evo Plus utilized a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface with the NVMe 1.3 protocol. It features the Phoenix controller and the M.2 2280 single-sided for factor on all capacities, including the 2TB drive, ensuring compatibility with most notebooks.
It comes in a sleek black box with an image of the drive out front. On the top right of the box is the sticker indicating the drive’s capacity.
Upon opening the box, the drive itself is there with a plastic cover for extra protection and under all these is the installation and warranty guide.
Samsung’s Magician and Data Migration
Using Samsung’s software, you can monitor, benchmark, and even clone your drives.
Crystal Disk Mark 7 Real World Performance Comparison
en clone existing drives to your new Samsung SSD. At the time of writing, the current version is Version 6.1.0 while the Data Migration is at Version 4.0.
The software has gone through revamps compared to previous versions which looked rather archaic. This allows to access drive information like health and temperature, and also the amount of space free and used on the volume. Drive management can also be done through the Samsung Magician software and perform tasks like performance benchmarking, diagnostic scans, overprovisioning and performance optimization. Lastly, using the Samsung Data Migration software, you can clone your current drive on to your new Samsung drive.
Crystal Disk Mark 7 Benchmark
This is a decent benchmark used to measure theoretical performance levels of a hard drive or SSD.
The Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB drives that we have been rated at 3500MB/s and 3300MB/s Sequential Read and Write. Based on these Peak and Real World performances, we see Samsung leading overall in Peak performances for both read and writes. Coming close to their rated speeds. While in the real world performances, they came out ahead at Read speeds.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The ATTO Disk Benchmark measures storage system performances with various transfer sizes and test lengths for Reads and Writes.
Using the ATTO Disk Benchmark, we see Samsung’s rated speed was not quite met. With a 3.13GB/s Read and 3.12GB/s Write, we see the read speed quite below the rated speed. Although, compared to other brands, they quite held their rated speeds to above 3.0GB/s on both ends.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD Benchmark is a free software designed solely for solid-state drives. Performing an array of sequential read and write tests, along with sequential access times over portions of the drive.
With the AS SSD Benchmark, we see the Samsung 970 EVO Plus produce a read score of 134.44MB/s on Sequential Writes and 45MB/s Sequential Reads.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
The Samsung 970 EVO Plus is part of their 5th generation design which has increased layer counts of their 3-bit MLC V-NAND compared to the former 64-layer of the previous generation. We can confirm the consistency of the read and writes on both random and sequential performances of the drive.
Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus has been a popular choice among tech enthusiasts and has been one of the faster performing drives ever since its launch.
At a price of about ₱12,930 at PCHub. E-Sports Gaming Authority, it is on the expensive side of things but its performance has a lot say about it. To top it all off, the Samsung 970 EVO Plus comes with a 5-year warranty that should ease your mind.