The Mainstream Phoenix Rises: Samsung's 970 EVO (500GB & 1TB) SSDs Reviewed
by Billy Tallis on April 24, 2018 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 peak performance of the Samsung 970 EVO on our Light test is record-setting, but that's only an improvement of 6% over the Samsung 960 PRO's average data rate—not a big enough difference to notice on such a light workload. When the test is run on a full drive, the 970 EVO loses more performance than most top drives, because it is one of the few TLC-based drives in that tier.
The average and 99th percentile latencies from the 970 EVO on the Light test are some of the best we've measured, still represent tiny improvements over Samsung's previous high-end SSDs.
The Samsung 970 EVO leads over other flash-based SSDs for both average read and write latency, but the differences are just a few microseconds and thus completely imperceptible.
The Samsung 970 EVO is the first drive to keep its 99th percentile write latency below 100µs whether or not the Light test is run on a full drive, showing that the 4-6GB static SLC cache is still quite useful even when the dynamically sized portion of the cache is unavailable. The 99th percentile read latency shows that Samsung has improved their full-drive QoS over the 960 EVO, but for the 500GB model in particular they still have room for improvement.
The energy usage of the Samsung 970 EVO is slightly higher than the PM981, putting the 970 EVO in last place for efficiency among flash-based SSDs. The energy usage of the 970 EVO doesn't show much variation between running the test on a full vs empty drive, despite the large performance differences between those scenarios.
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qlum - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Just as a reminder how the argument against the ssd can change overtime:Right now the prices at least here in the netherlands are as follows:
Crucial MX500 (SATA) €160
HP EX920 (NVMe PCIe x4) €287
Intel 760p (NVMe PCIe x4 ) €289
WD Black (NVMe PCIe x4) €312
Samsung 970 EVO (NVMe PCIe x4) €269
Samsung 960 PRO €374
Suddenly the 970 evo is the cheapest of the bunch this makes its value a lot better
Of course there are still cheaper nvme ssds such as the intel 660p but at the tb mark its one of the cheapest nvme ssd's
modeonoff - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Isn't nvme m.2 SSD performance affected by Meltdown/Spectre patches?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Yes, because storage benchmarks make system calls more frequently than almost anything else. Once the updates have been applied to the testbed, I'll be re-testing everything for future reviews. This will take a while, so I've waited until I have several reviews worth of testing completed that can fill the gap before I have new results for a new drive and the older drives it needs to be compared against.My preliminary tests of the impact of the patches show that while the scores themselves are affected, the rankings of drives aren't, so the current measurements are still useful for judging which drives are best.
Reppiks - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Could be nice to see AMD vs Intel post patches as it shouldn't affect AMD as much?Infy2 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Nvme and Sata controllers are made by AsMedia on AMD's AM4 mother boards. Sadly they are somewhat slower than Intel's controllers. Even after Spectre and Meltdown patches Intel is still king of storage performance.Tamz_msc - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Ryzen CPUs have a dedicated PCI-E x4 link for nvme drives which bypasses the chipset.bernstein - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
nvme is just PCIe x4 + software... that's why a passive pcie x4 to m.2 works. and why a nvme m.2 ssd should work with reduced speed over PCIe x1 or PCIe x2. the same goes for PCIe 2.0 links... combine these and you get a working passive mPCIe to M.2 adapter.willis936 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
NVMe controllers are made by Intel, AMD, and Microsoft (and whatever analog set of companies for mobile) because it's just a software stack that runs on CPUs.Kwarkon - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Close but not exactly. You mean drivers.HStewart - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
I personally think people are making a bigger deal of this Methdown/Spectre stuff than it worth it.Yes performance is one area - but there are other reasons why people purchase a product.
Especially in heavy graphics or in this case storage usage - these patches should not have no minimal effect.
To the average customer - the effect is not notice - how much will they notice a 5% or leas slow down in cpu speed. But change a hard drive to one of these SSD's would be a significant improvement