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 - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
Our initial runs of the Heavy test on the Samsung 970 EVO produced results similar to the Samsung PM981, with the 1TB model showing worse performance on an empty drive than a full drive. This seems to be related to the secure erase process used to wipe the drive before the test. Like many drives, the 970 EVO seems to lie about when it has actually finished cleaning up. Adding an extra 10 minutes of idle time before launching the Heavy test produced the results seen here, and in the future all drives will be tested with longer pauses after erasing (all other drives were given at least two minutes of idle time after each erase).
With the odd behavior eliminated, the Samsung 970 EVO comes close to setting a new record on the Heavy test. The empty drive performance of the 1TB model is up in Optane territory, though the full drive average data rate is not much higher than other TLC-based drives. The 500GB model is far slower, and its full-drive performance doesn't even keep pace with the Intel SSD 760p.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores from the Samsung 970 EVO are about normal and in line with its closest competitors, except for the particularly good empty-drive score from the 1TB 970 EVO.
The average write latency of the 970 EVO is fairly typical for a high-end NVMe SSD, but the average read latency of the 1TB 970 EVO in the best case is surprisingly quick. Both capacities show a larger than normal gap between empty and full drive performance, even after accounting for the fact that they are using TLC to compete against the best MLC drives.
The 99th percentile read latency scores from both tested capacities of the 970 EVO show a big difference between full drive and empty drive performance. The 500GB drive's read QoS doesn't seem up to par, but the 1TB model's scores would look pretty good if the WD Black hadn't recently shown up with an MLC-like minimal performance loss when full. The 99th percentile write latency scores of the 970 EVO are good but not substantially better than the competition, and the 500GB model is clearly worse at keeping latency under control than the 1TB model or MLC drives of similar capacity.
The 500GB 970 EVO continues the trend of relatively poor power efficiency from the Samsung Phoenix controller, but the 1TB model in its best case of running the test on an empty drive is fast enough that its overall energy usage is comparable to good SATA drives.
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mapesdhs - Sunday, May 6, 2018 - link
HollyDOL, as others have said, it very much depends on what you're doing. As a C-drive it simply helps to have any kind of SSD at all rather than a rust spinner (except of course the cheap junk knockoffs like Gloway). The Vertex3 was a pretty good SSD for its time (I have lots of them), though back then the Vertex4 presented its own significant bump up in benchmark performance, as did the Vector. For general use, you might notice some difference compared to an NVMe device, certainly in bootup times, but beyond that it depends on the task. Some games will certainly load a lot quicker, assuming the CPU/RAM are able to take advantage of it. And btw, some older mbds can have a mod BIOS installed to enable booting from NVMe (I'm more familiar with the options for ASUS boards in this regard), and certain NVMe SSDs even have their own boot ROM (eg. 950 Pro) such that native boot support isn't required.It's a good idea for video editing though, eg. the main cache/scratch drive for After Effects or Vegas.
Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Unless you work moving huge chunks of data (editing 4k for example) a lot there's no point going NVME over the Crucial MX500 sata.Death666Angel - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Especially in cramped cases, small form factor stuff, the gum stick is really nice because you don't need annoying cables around. My next MoBo will be some Ryzen thing in mATX with 2 M.2 slots (likely PCIe and SATA), so I can go all SSD for my desktop without any cables. I haven't noticed improvements after going to SATA3 SSDs from my Vertex/Agility first gen ones.iwod - Saturday, April 28, 2018 - link
I can't disagree more. SATA is limited in Seq speed. And it is actually a user observable difference in everyday use, between a 1.5 - 2GB/s and 600MB/s speed.Now whether that is worth a little more money you paid for is a different question.
peevee - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
And how you are going to hit the seq speed in real life? All external (USB or network) sources and targets are slower. Writing does not matter with write-back OS caching. Reading a document into memory is limited by memory size and actually parsing/decompression of the document. Unless you are copying huge files between RAM drives and your SSD, you have no use case. That is why the tests are generating random data on the fly, like NOTHING does in real life. And that is why sites like AT have NO reproducible real-life tests (like compilation of a large software package for example, or recoding of video), as they would show about 0 real difference between drives 2x in price.mapesdhs - Sunday, May 6, 2018 - link
I see a nice difference when cloning my photo/video archive (1TB SM961), moving files around, network access, etc., to the extent I'm now looking into 10GigE.Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
You don't see everyday benefits because the things that make SSD's faster than HDD's (access times, random 4k QD1 reads) barely improves from sata to nvme. Even with an optane SSD you won't see much improvement.Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
1-SSD had 100x less access time vs HDD and 100x higher 4k random performance, NVME basically only improves on sustained transfer raters.Going from 5-10ms to 0.07ms and from 400KB/s to 40MB/s~ was a lot.
Cooe - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
Yup. Without a doubt a good NVMe is much snappier, but you have to be the right kind of PC user for the difference to be that level of obvious. Even the heaviest applications, projects, etc... open instantly or near it vs the usual couple seconds, up to a minute or so for the really beefy crap with SATA-III, so if you're well familiar with PC's & in-tune with yours' level of performance, and are somebody who's regularly booting up, closing, and switching between multiple applications, storage heavy projects, etc... NVMe provides an obviously superior experience. And even if you aren't that kind of person yet, if you have compatible hardware the price gap has shrunk enough that I'd still recommend NVMe over SATA regardless as storage loads only ever increase with time. Aka you might not be the kind of person/PC user that can/will notice it now, but in a few years chances are that you most definitely will, and'll be glad you made the choice you did.For most lighter users atm otoh, SATA-III's already plenty fast enough for the workloads they regularly do. And that's on top of the fact that they simply don't have the level of "PC awareness" for the difference to stand out the way it does for heavy users and PC nerds like myself. And of course, even for us heavy users & multi-taskers who get real & significant benefits from the switch, it's still nothing on the order of the HDD to SATA SSD jump which is why those not well aware of their PC's current performance level and whom aren't heavy storage users (lots of regular & concurrent file access, movement, and modification) are rather likely to not notice the improvements w/o having them explictly pointed out (ala instantaneous or near it launches of most apps, even for multiples simultaneously vs delay's of a handful of seconds to a minute+ or so for the biggies, vastly improved file copy & movement speeds, ability to maintain SATA SSD levels of responsiveness while heavy storage workload(s) are active in the background, etc...)
Cliff34 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link
For me, the higher premium prices for nvm ssd vs sata ssd is not worth for the performance gain. I'm sure a nvm ssd is faster but I don't want to shell out few hundreds dollars (comparing the 1td) more to have my computer a few seconds faster.