Samsung 970 EVO 2TB M.2 NVMe Review

Conclusion

After some of our recent reviews it’s nice to have a product that is so simple to summarise.

The Samsung range has been hugely impressive in every version we’ve tested, from their initial SSDs up to the 960 Pro M.2. The 970 EVO NVMe M.2 2TB is a continuation of this theme.

Knowing that the 960 range was already a roaring success with its combination of speed and reliability, it doesn’t surprise us at all that the 970 EVO is very much a refinement of this, instead of a wholesale redesign. The Phoenix controller at the heart of the 970 EVO has been tweaked and the position of the 970 EVO in our graphs have shown how successful this is. Probably the biggest upgrade is a doubling of the amount of TBW (Terabytes Written) that the 970 EVO is guaranteed for, up to 1200. Unless you’re the type of person who has nVidia Shadowplay permanently recording – and to some degree even if you are – you are unlikely to get close to this figure.

Additionally Samsung have made the 970 EVO more efficient than its predecessor which has the knock on effect of reducing the thermal load. When you combine this to a new coating on the Phoenix controller and a slight tweak to the heatspreader design you can be sure that thermally throttling the drive will never become an issue. Our testing revealed how consistent the 970 EVO is in every benchmark we threw at it, never hitting unexpected performance hitches. It is blisteringly fast with small block sizes and you don’t have to get very far into larger blocks before it’s running flat out. Even at 32KB block sizes it’s over 2000 MB/s in both read and write, and by the time you reach 1MB block sizes it’s pretty much at peak performance all the time.

The Samsung 970 EVO 2TB M.2 NVMe drive is an absolute star, taking the already class-leading performance of their 960 range and smoothing out what few minor imperfections there were to give a drive which is large enough to handle an operating system and a large selection of applications and games, whilst being extremely quick and reliable. £710 for the 2TB model we reviewed today is a reasonable investment, but it shows how affordable solid state technology has become, and you’re certainly getting best in class performance for your money. It is all things to all people and thus wins our OC3D Performance Award.

  

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