The Samsung 970 EVO Plus (250GB, 1TB) NVMe SSD Review: 92-Layer 3D NAND

AnandTech 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.