Closer Look: Samsung 970 EVO

Samsung’s SSD 970 EVO solid state drive series are available for M.2 2280 form factor motherboards, and offered in four capacities: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB. The 1TB Samsung SSD 970 EVO solid state drive we received for testing in this review is presently available online for $394.99 (Amazon | Newegg).

Solid state storage has become standard equipment for performance-minded consumers because they work equally well in PC, Linux, or Apple computer systems. Likewise, these storage devices easily install into modern desktop and notebook platforms equipped with a M.2 2280 card slot. 970 EVO is designed for performance enthusiasts, and gives personal computers a much faster response time that can really help boost productivity and user experience.
Samsung’s 64-cell layer V-NAND technology is designed to sustain an 300TB Terabytes Written (TBW) for the 500GB capacity, 600TB for the 1TB unit we’re testing, and 1200 TBW for the 2TB 970 EVO, coinciding with Samsung’s industry-leading 5-year limited warranty.

SSD 970 EVO utilizes Samsung’s ‘Phoneix’ PCIe-to-NAND controller to manage 4x PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth with the host, while managing multiple NAND flash memory across 8 channels. The LPDDR4 buffer on 970 EVO varies by capacity: 512MB cache for 250/500GB capacities, 1GB cache for this 1TB unit, and 2GB cache on the 2TB model.

Samsung SSD 970 EVO is intended for the full-sized 80x22mm M.2 2280 form factor. Like most other M.2 SSDs, the 970 EVO does not benefit from any heatspreader device to cool the NAND or DRAM chips on the board.
In the next few sections we’ll benchmark test the Samsung SSD 970 EVO, and compare this M.2 solid state drive to other NVMe storage products intended for notebook and desktop installations. For reference, Samsung advertises up to 3400 MB/s read and 2500 MB/s write speeds for their 1TB 970 EVO solid state drive.