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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kgardas - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Thanks for explanation! Actually makes sense indeed. This would also mean that if your workflow is read dominated and you are sensitive on latency than RAID1 of SATA drives may be faster than NVMe. At least if SATA/SAS chip is not a crap.ikjadoon - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
Even a SATA SSD could pump 4 kB random read numbers up, but it'd require pricey SLC. MLC and TLC both have 2x to 4x slower page reads to register vs SLC.latency source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/6337/samsung-ssd-84...
Still, TLC 4 kB random has improved, but not by "leaps and bounds" like 4K write has. The 970 EVO Plus has 53% faster random 4kB reads (sustained) than the MX 500. And even a 960 PRO has 76% faster 4kB reads (sustained) than the MX500.
FWIW, random 4K read performance (both burst and sustained) doesn't benefit much of anything from parallelization. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2229?vs=21... The 250 GB and 1 TB 960 EVO have identical 4K read performance, i.e. within 0.75%. Random 4K write and larger page sizes are about 2x faster on the 1 TB model, however.
Can't vouch for accuracy, but this answer sounds right: https://superuser.com/questions/1168014/nvme-ssd-w...
Alistair - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
The performance is amazing, and I've been buying the 1TB SX8200 for $180 USD before tax. Nothing beats that still.Dark_wizzie - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
1tb ex820 for $160 after tax and shipping beats it.palindrome - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
You mean EX920 and it has been as low as $153 recently (before tax).gglaw - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
Not too long ago it was $135 twice with the Ebay and Rakuten 15% coupons. $155 range seems almost every other week now and frequent enough I'd even consider it the typical selling price. (Very few people who follow tech would actually pay $180 for it). Can't beat this for consumer use with the small performance differences with current gen drives. When the EX950 and SX8200 Pro phase it out and drop to the same price points, they'll replace it as best consumer deals so I don't see the new Samsung or WD having a place in my line-up.If for some purpose I can find a use for something more expensive, it'd have to be the next gen 970 Pro (Plus?) if it's a major upgrade.
** A - R ** - Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - link
https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronic...Billy, Specs in the official site mentions MLC, here I see it's TLC ! ?
Could You please verify it.
olafgarten - Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - link
It says 3 bit MLC, meaning TLC.mortenge - Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - link
Why do you bring Optain into the mix and not the 970 PRO, when all we care about is EVO vs PRO?alfatekpt - Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - link
The review should include 970 EVO 250GB numbers for comparison.