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

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus has a significantly higher average data rate on The Destroyer than its predecessor, or any other TLC-based SSD we've ever tested. It's about 15% slower overall than the Intel Optane SSD 900P that costs about four times as much per GB. The smallest 250GB 970 EVO Plus is little less than half as fast as the 1TB model, but that still puts it above the 1TB HP EX920 and anything else in the 250GB capacity class.

The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the 970 EVO Plus are a clear improvement over its predecessors, but it doesn't come out ahead of all the competition. The Phison E12-based Corsair MP510 outperforms the 970 EVO Plus on both metrics, and the WD Black SN750 has better 99th percentile latency.

The 970 EVO Plus has a faster average read latency on The Destroyer than any of its competition, but the Corsair MP510 still holds the top spot for average write latency thanks to its very fast write cache. Among the slightly different mix of smaller drives, the 250GB 970 EVO Plus has a much more commanding lead in average write latency than average read latency.

The 1TB 970 EVO Plus has better 99th percentile read and write latency scores than its predecessor, but it can't entirely catch up to the best competitors we've seen in recent months. The smaller drives have vastly higher 99th percentile latencies, but the 250GB 970 EVO Plus comes out ahead among that group with a small write QoS lead and a larger read QoS lead.

The 1TB 970 EVO Plus uses slightly less energy to complete The Destroyer than its predecessor. However, both capacities are still very inefficient compared to the best drives in their capacity class. At 1TB there are options that are both very efficient and very fast, but the only particularly efficient small NVMe drive we've tested is the entry-level MyDigitalSSD SBX.