Samsung's 970 Pro SSD is a truly impressive SSD. Thanks to being built on MLC flash, and using a custom Samsung controller, the drive breezes through our benchmarks, leaving nearly all other drives behind. Synthetic testing results are amazing, at up to 400,000 IOPS random write, which is higher than anything we've seen before, and the IOPS rates don't even go down when you switch to mixed read/write loads or pure read. Sequential writes reach 2,400 MB/s, which also sets a new record.

In real-life testing, results are good, too, but not nearly as a high as in the synthetic tests. During actual usage, you will see tangible benefits for write-heavy loads, but the majority of applications only see limited gains since the introduction of even the first SSDs saw most of the bottleneck shift away from storage, to things like CPU and software algorithms. One curious result is the Microsoft Office installation, which does something NVMe drives don't like during its error-checking process, especially Samsung SSDs do very badly here. I have reproduced this behavior many times on many drives, and Office is one of the most installed applications on the planet, so it's a valid result.

When averaged over our real-life tests, the Samsung 970 Pro is the second fastest drive in our test group, very closely behind the TLC-based ADATA SX8200. When looking at individual tests other than the Office result, the 970 Pro is the fastest drive we ever tested with real-life applications. The differences are not as huge as you would expect from the synthetic numbers, though. Typical M.2 NVMe SSDs are just a few percent behind, and good SATA drives are not much more than 10% slower on average.

Thermal throttling is an issue on most NVMe SSDs, and the 970 Pro is no exception. We could hammer the drive with writes for around 150 seconds before thermal protection kicked in and dropped write speeds from 2.1 GB/s to 1.5 GB/s, which is still an amazing result that's better than any drive we ever tested before. Also, you have to consider that writing that much data in such a short time is highly unlikely. Even with thermal throttling active, you're writing 100 GB of data per minute(!), if your data source can even provide data that quickly.

If you are writing a lot of data indeed in a short timeframe, then our sustained writes test will be important for you. Slower drives, especially TLC-based ones, will reduce their write speeds after a while, sometimes even down to HDD levels, until they can clear out their caches (which only takes a few seconds after writes stop and full performance is restored). This isn't happening with the Samsung 970 Pro. Write speeds stay fairly constant, at around 2,000 MB/s, no doubt thanks to the use of MLC flash chips. Best drive on the market if you regularly write a ton of data!

If you're now screaming "I want one!", then we're with you. However, the 970 Pro isn't exactly cheap. Our tested 512 GB version retails at $200, which is almost twice the price of many competing NVMe SSDs. For example, our price/performance favorite, the ADATA SX8200, currently goes for $110 for the 480 GB version and isn't much slower in real-life despite being built on TLC flash. Of course, it will fall behind when it comes to heavy writes, but these are quite rare for most users. Another option to consider is a traditional SATA 2.5" SSD, which certainly won't be as sexy or compact, but these can be had for $85 for 500 GB, which means your $200 could get you more than 1 TB of SSD storage at the same cost as a Samsung 970 Pro 512 GB.