Samsung

Samsung

Samuel Axon



Samsung has announced availability of the next generation of its popular line of M.2 SSDs: the Samsung 970 Pro and 970 Evo will be available worldwide starting May 7.

Samsung impressed users with its V-NAND technology in the 950 Pro back in 2015. That SSD ditched SATA in favor of M.2 2280 and PCIe 3x4. That was a big change, given that the 850 Evo was already hugely popular as it was. A year later, Samsung shipped the 960 Evo and Pro, which offered significantly better read and write speeds and a then-new five-core controller. When we reviewed the Samsung 960 Pro, we found that it was by far the fastest consumer SSD available at that time—such that we even questioned whether very many users even needed that kind of speed.

With these new SSDs, Samsung has modestly bumped up those speeds even more—at least when it comes to write speeds. The consumer-focused Evo offers a sequential read speed of up to 3,500 MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 2,500 MB/s with 480,000 IOPS. The higher-end Pro SSD, meanwhile, offers the same read speed but a sequential write speed of up to 2,700 MB/s with 500,000 IOPS. The Pro uses 2-bit MLC memory, while the Evo uses 3-bit. Samsung has moved to 64-layer 3D NAND. Both use Samsung's Phoenix controller, which has appeared in enterprise drives before.

These SSDs are intended for gaming use cases and professional creative work situations that require very high-end performance. For drives like these (or any, really) longevity is a key consideration for consumers, so Samsung has come out of the gate with a five-year warranty with support for up to 1,200TB written; that's 50 percent more than what Samsung claimed for the 960 SSDs.

The Pro is available in 512GB and 1TB, while the Evo comes in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. Pricing starts at $199.