Samsung Launches the 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD Family

[Valantar]

would you buy the 970 evo plus 500gb or the 970 pro 512gb

other than size no.
if you're looking for bigger drives check out the prices on hp ex920,sx8200,wd black 2018,wd sn750,plextor m8 and m9,intel 760p first.sammys are great,I own three 850 pro's and a 860 evo myself,but they cost a premium. I got two adata drives recently,they both cost noticeably less than the samsung counterparts,and they perform as good.

you mean you want to move from 950pro+850pro to one 970 drive ?
no,you wouldn't see a difference.I'd perfer your setup over a single 970. 950 pro is as good or a better drive than 970 evo. 850 pro has stupendously long warranty.
look at real wold tasks, 950 pro whips 970 evo. 970 evo is an amazing drive but once the turbo cache buffer wears out the performance drop is significant.
https://www.purepc.pl/pamieci_masow..._970_plus_nowe_pamieci_nowa_energia?page=0,13

I don't know what workloads you're putting on your drives, @ChrisX0X , but if you're anything near a normal user, a 970 Pro is ridiculous overkill. One might argue that any x4 NVMe drive is, but never mind that - the 970 pro is made for very write-heavy workloads that are never, ever seen in consumer usage. Unless you're running a video editing workstation for 8k footage or something similar, it's entirely unnecessary. The same goes for the 950 Pro, really, though it's being caught up to by current high-end TLC drives at "reasonable" prices, at least.

From what I understand, Samsung is on the expensive side in the US (here in Norway, they're usually cheaper than WD or ADATA, and HP don't even sell SSDs here) - if so, I would go for whatever gives you 1TB the cheapest among the WD Black, EX920 or SX8200, as they should all perform comparably.

As for exceeding the turbo cache - when does a consumer workload ever write 12GB+ continuously at such a speed that the controller can't shuffle it over to TLC during the transfer? Say we have a Steam install, which downloads, decompresses and installs continuously - given a 1.25x compression ratio for the download (which is likely), you'd need a 22,4 gigabit internet connection to max out a 3500MB/s drive. Given that >10GBE networking doesn't exist outside of datacenters, I kind of doubt that's an issue. If the write speed is in the hundreds of MB/s, the controller will shuffle data out as needed, and the cache will never fill. And for anything else, as in normal desktop usage, the biggest writes you'll ever see are in the low hundreds of MB (large save files, downloads, huge PDFs, etc.), and you'll be limited in nearly all cases by something else than your SSD. Mixed read/write workloads can choke drives, but only if they're heavy and sustained, which is again exceedingly rare in consumer usage. And, of course, the difference is usually in the <1s range if we're talking transferring files, unzipping, or something like that. You'll likely be bottlenecked elsewhere no matter what. And you'd never, ever notice the difference between any of these cheaper drives and a 970 Pro unless you have very specific demands. You might notice the difference between cheap x2 NVMe drives, but outside of really crappy ones, even that's not very likely for the average enthusiast user.

 

[ChrisX0X]

a very interesting answer @Valantar. it comes to prove that most times, companies releasing faster and shinier drives is more marketing than anything else. And no, im not editing 8k or anything close to it really. I just play the odd game every now and then
i added my system specs as an FYI

(I live in EU and samsung drives are quite reasonably priced compared to competition)

 

[Valantar]

a very interesting answer @Valantar. it comes to prove that most times, companies releasing faster and shinier drives is more marketing than anything else. And no, im not editing 8k or anything close to it really. I just play the odd game every now and then
i added my system specs as an FYI

(I live in EU and samsung drives are quite reasonably priced compared to competition)

It's not that these drives have no use, but just like >10-core CPUs, they are geared towards workloads that no home user ever really sees. NVMe itself improved response times to such a degree over SATA that you'll be hard pressed to notice anything faster (though reportedly the performance at low queue depths of 3D Xpoint is noticeable, if small). I have my game library split across my 500GB 960 Evo boot drive and a 500GB 850 Evo SATA drive, and while I think the games on the NVMe load faster, I can't actually tell the difference - might as well be differences between the games or other stuff bottlenecking it, and nothing ever feels slow (even if both drives are >90% full right now - yeah, I have to start uninstalling stuff I've finished ...).

NVMe drives have their use, and definite value, but the faster you get, the smaller the returns in terms of noticeable speed-ups become. Capacity definitely matters a lot more than absolute performance as soon as you exceed 1500-2000MB/s sequential speeds and 2x SATA IOPS. I got a 960 Evo as much for convenience (no cabling, small, unobtrusive) as for the performance, even if my boot times did improve somewhat from my previous 840 Pro boot drive.

 

[nemesis.ie]

Maybe the NVME game load speed would be noticeable if you had a >10 core CPU and the loading mechanism loaded it properly.

<Tongue in cheek comment BTW!>

 

[Vlada011]

And finally Samsung 970 EVO Plus become my official M.2.

 

[John Naylor]

Maybe the NVME game load speed would be noticeable if you had a >10 core CPU and the loading mechanism loaded it properly.

<Tongue in cheek comment BTW!>

I switching the boot drives in my offcie and at home with the kids (if ya can call college students and graduates kids) .... no one very notices. Each machine boots off a Samsung Pro 256 GB SSD and the 1st partition on the SSHD is a backup of the OS.

 

[nemesis.ie]

You did notice the "Tongue in cheek" bit?

What exact drives were you swapping?

Boot speed is kind of irrelevant, if it's 15 seconds or 30 most folks won't notice. 1-2 mins versus 20 seconds is another matter.

 

[Valantar]

You did notice the "Tongue in cheek" bit?

What exact drives were you swapping?

Boot speed is kind of irrelevant, if it's 15 seconds or 30 most folks won't notice. 1-2 mins versus 20 seconds is another matter.

Yeah, boot speed is no big deal. Application load times are another matter. I've been tinkering with an old dumpster-dived PC recently, and even with half-decent specs, using it off the HDD it came with was a nightmare. Opening a web browser or anything remotely demanding took a very noticeable time, while swapping to a SATA SSD removed that wait almost entirely. Going from 20 to 2 seconds to launch an app is very noticeable, the further reduction to 1.5-1 second going to an NVMe drive is... generally not worth it.