Samsung feels the ‘need for speed’ with 970 PRO and EVO NVMe SSD

970 PRO and EVO

Samsung has released the 970 PRO and EVO, its third generation, NVMe SSD with theoretical read/write speeds of 3,500MB/s and 2,700MB/s – that is fast!

It seems like only months ago we were reviewing the 860 PRO and EVO – in fact, it was January. The 970 PRO and EVO series blow these away.

It is all possible because Samsung design and develop the 64-layer V-NAND used in the drives. And drive is perhaps a misnomer – these are in the M.2 (2280) format which is the little card inside most laptops.

Claudio Cardile, Director, B2B Sales, Consumer Electronics, Samsung Electronics Australia said:

“We are pleased to bring our third-generation consumer solid state drive (SSD) line-up to the Australian market. The 970 PRO and EVO series is for tech enthusiasts, gamers, home PC users and professionals who rely on having the high bandwidth for intensive workloads on PCs and workstations.”

“970 EVO, includes TurboWrite Technology which enables fast write speeds, without compromising on quality or performance. The 970 PRO maximises the potential of NVMe bandwidth, delivering unparalleled performance for processing large volumes of data, including 3D, 4K graphics work, high-end games and data analytics.”

That’s right – the 970 PRO and EVO speeds are available to all of us.

Australian Website here.

Category 970 PRO 970 EVO
Interface PCIe Gen 3.0 x4, NVMe 1.3
Form Factor M.2 (2280)
Storage Memory Samsung 64L V-NAND 2-bit MLC Samsung 64L V-NAND 3-bit MLC
Controller Samsung Phoenix Controller
Cache Memory 1GB LPDDR4 DRAM (1TB)
512MB LPDDR4 DRAM (512GB)
2GB LPDDR4 DRAM (2TB)
1GB LPDDR4 DRAM (1TB)
512MB LPDDR4 DRAM (250GB/500GB)
Capacity 512GB and 1TB 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB
Sequential Read/Write Speed Up to 3,500/2,700 MB/s Up to 3,500/2,500 MB/s
Random Read/Write Speed Up to 500,000/500,000 IOPS Up to 500,000/480,000 IOPS
Device Sleep 5mW
Management Software Samsung Magician Software
Data Encryption Class 0 (AES 256), TCG/Opal v2.0, MS eDrive (IEEE1667)
Total Byte Written 1,200TB (1TB)
600TB (512GB)
1,200TB (2TB)
600TB (1TB)
300TB (500GB)
150TB (250GB)
Warranty Five-year Limited Warranty*

* Five years or TBW, whichever comes first

The 970 PRO and EVO will be available from 7 May 2018 and are priced from A$479 and $175 respectively.

GadgetGuy’s take – I feel the need for speed

Each generation gets faster, cheaper and better. Samsung is at the leading edge – many other brands take much longer to get anywhere near these speeds. Competition is good as it drives us all further.

Joe and Jane Average won’t rip out and buy these. They are perfectly happy with the current speeds of their laptops – around 1,000MB/s in most cases. Let’s face it solid state storage devices seldom fail, and most laptops are too hard to repair anyway.

This is for the petrol head enthusiast or professional that wants to render 3D images, videos and work on large files.

I will be very interested to see what performance increase the 970 EVO has with large files. It has The Intelligent TurboWrite technology, which uses a large buffer size of up to 78GB to enable faster write speeds.