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Samsung has updated its hugely popular SSD 970 EVO series with the company's latest 5th generation V-NAND TLC memory to produce the 970 EVO Plus. Does it make any difference to real world performance, and is it worth the £240 asking price?
Samsung's 5th generation V-NAND 3-bit MLC, or TLC V-NAND to you and me, sees the layer count rise up from the 64-layer of the previous generation to ‘9*-layer'. as stated by Samsung. This is a surprising move by Samsung as they are usually keen to let everyone know how exactly many layers their NAND has.
At launch the M.2 2280 970 EVO Plus range consisted of three capacities; 250GB, 500GB and the flagship 1TB model which we are looking at here.
The latest NAND and firmware updates to the Samsung Phoenix controller gives the 970 EVO Plus some pretty good performance improvements over the good old 970 EVO. The 1TB SSD 970 EVO Plus is official rated at up to 3,500MB/s for Sequential reads and up to 3,300MB/s for writes compared to up to 3,400MB/s and 2,500MB/s for read/writes respectively for the SSD970 EVO.
Samsung quote two queue depth figures for 4K random performance of the new drive. At QD1 the drive is rated as up to 19,000 IOPS for reads and 60,000 IOPS for writes which is up from the 15,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS figures respectively for the 970 EVO. At a much deeper QD of 32 the drive is rated as up to 600,000 IOPS for reads and 550,000 IOPS for writes. Again this is an improvement over the original 970 EVO drive which has a read rating of up to 500,000 IOPS and 450,000 IOPS for writes.
Endurance for the 1TB SSD970 Plus is quoted as 600 TBW (the same as the original SSD970 EVO) and Samsung backs the drive with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 1TB.
NAND Components: Samsung 9*-layer TLC V-NAND.
NAND Controller: Samsung Pheonix.
Cache: 1GB LPDDR4.
Interface: PCIe Gen 3.0 x4, NVMe 1.3.
Form Factor: M.2 2280.
Dimensions: 80.15 x 22.15 x 2.38mm
Drive Weight: 8g
Firmware Version: 1B2Q
