The Samsung 970 EVO Plus (250GB, 1TB) NVMe SSD Review: 92-Layer 3D NAND
by Billy Tallis on January 22, 2019 10:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Samsung 970 EVO Plus has the highest average data rates on the Light test, and even the 250GB Plus is faster than the 1TB original 970 EVO. Ignoring its predecessor, the 970 EVO Plus is more than 20% faster than the next fastest competitors. The lead isn't quite as pronounced when looking at full-drive performance, but the 970 EVO Plus is still on top.
The Samsung 970s turn in the best average and 99th percentile latency scores on the Light test, though the 250GB model's 99th percentile latency is strongly affected when the drive is full. Aside from that, the 250GB model's latency is not meaningfully higher than the 1TB model, and none of the other drives in that capacity class offer such low latency.
The 970 EVO Plus tops the charts for both average read and write latency scores from the Light test. The average write latency of the 250GB model does show that the smaller drive's performance suffers when the test is run on a full drive, but the other small TLC drives are all worse off.
The 970 EVO Plus is joined by several other drives in having 99th percentile write latencies under 100µs, but the 250GB model can't maintain that when the test is run on a full drive. The 99th percentile read latencies are great, but the full-drive read QoS for both capacities of the 970 EVO Plus is nothing special for this product segment.
The high performance of the 970 EVO Plus once again comes at the cost of power efficiency, with energy usage that is significantly above the competition and twice that of the WD Black SN750. The performance potential of the 970 EVO Plus is largely wasted on a workload this light, and that leads to wasted power.
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Chaitanya - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
Quite a minor upgrade over previous drive.jeremyshaw - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
Hence the name.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
More substantial than the WD Black SN750.I don't think we'll see any more big jumps until PCIe 4.0 ships. Pretty much everybody has caught up on the NAND side, and most of the controller vendors have had decent NVMe controllers out for a while. There's no low-hanging fruit like there was when companies were still trying to make SM2260 or Phison E7 compete against Samsung with inferior NAND.
DanNeely - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
More to the point it is a consistent incremental improvement. There've been far too many cases over the years when a v.next drive was an incremental improvement in manufacturing cost, that regressed in most to all performance numbers.boozed - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
I call those performance improvements significant (just).Flunk - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link
I don't think it's enough to elevate this drive over the high-end Silicon Motion drives in real-world uses. Not for consumers at least.nectrone - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link
96-layer nand is an improvement on production speed, yields, and manufacturing cost, rather than perf. And tbh, we don't need better perf at all, or maybe a bit in 4k random, because 150MBps is a bit low in 2019. Instead, what we need, is prices to drop, below twice the price of an hdd of the same capacity.In 2018, 1TB tlc nvme 64-layer ssd was 10 times the price of an hdd, now in Jan it's 5 times. Sata 64-layer ssd were 7 times the price of hdd, now it's 3. I'd like TLC nvme to cost twice an hdd, and sata tlc to be the same price as an hdd. With 96-layer, we'll get closer to that.
haukionkannel - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
Pity that the consumer version does not get 4.0 this year... I was hoping to have 4.0 compatible ssd when AMD 570x boards comes out. Well most like with my usage even these Are fast enough and I am not going to be Bottle negged by 3.0.sorten - Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - link
I had the same reaction. I'm running an old gaming PC and I'm ready to switch to AMD with a full set of upgrades at the end of the year and was hoping for PCIE 4.0, but my SSD is so old that I know any drive will be a huge improvement.ikjadoon - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
Meta: has the scrolling video ad been moved to the right? It finally doesn't cover up the article when you scroll. Huge thank you.970 EVO Plus: I'm excited for this to get added to the SSD 2018 Bench. Curious how close it matches the 970 PRO 512GB, now at $170. My almost-full 250GB 960 EVO needs a capacity increase and $40 isn't a big difference for a minimum two-year purchase.