Samsung 970 Evo
Like a Charizard, this SSD is fully evolved.
For the last few years, Samsung’s Evo family of NVMe solid-state drives have been ranked as the best SSD by us and many in the industry. Though these drives have never been the fastest, they’re hardly the most expensive — putting them in a middle ground for flash storage that’s five times faster than a typical SATA drive while still being affordable.
The prices of Samsung’s NVMe drives have been going down steadily with each successive generation, and thankfully that trend continues with the 970 line.
Three years and an equal number of iterations later, the Samsung 970 Evo continues to hold on to that crown. With vastly quicker sequential write speeds, this is incredibly fast, even compared to most modern NVMe drives.
The Evo runs with the fastest sequential read speed of 3,500MB/s and sequential write speed of up to 2,500MB/s — dramatically faster than the 960 Evo’s top-rated 3,200MB/s and 1,500MB/s sequential read and write speeds.
This is largely thanks to Samsung’s mid-range drive adopting nearly the same 64-layer MLC V-NAND technology as its higher-end Pro brothers. Previously, the 960 Evo was built with a more affordable, but slower, form of TLC V-NAND. The updated Pro and Evo drives also share a newly designed Phoenix controller.
Topping that off, the Samsung solid-state drives also employ Intelligent TurboWrite technology to generate a large buffer of up to 78GB for even faster write speeds. With all of these improvements, Samsung claims the 970 Evo delivers 65% faster sequential write speeds.
Though it doesn’t feature a fancy heat sink, like the Adata Gammix S11, Samsung does include Dynamic Thermal Guard technology to safeguard against overheating. The built-in hardware feature automatically monitors and maintains optimal operating temperatures, while a heat spreader and new nickel-coated controller further lower the SSD temperatures.
The Samsung 970 Evo’s dramatically faster write speeds look impressive on paper, and in our testing, it proves to be as quick as it claims. The SSD actually peaks above its rated speeds despite us running the drive against our toughest Q-depth 32 CrystalDisk Mark benchmarks. All of the read and write speeds far outpace the 960 Evo — even the higher-end 960 Pro.
This, topped off with slightly higher random write speeds, enables the 970 Evo to transfer a 10GB file in nearly half the time compared to its predecessor. Folder transfers see an even greater improvement reducing the amount of time needed from 25.2 seconds to 12.64 seconds.
The Samsung 970 Evo also just barely edges out its competition, the WD Black PCIe SSD, with faster random reads and writes, sequential reads, as well as 10GB file and folder transfers.
Like a starter Pokémon, the Samsung 970 Evo has reached its full potential with its third evolution. Thanks to multiple improvements in the silicon, this drive reads and writes faster than ever before, can run for longer without overheating and is more affordable at large capacities.
For all these reasons, we’ve given the Samsung 970 Evo a perfect score and our Hot Product award.