SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS
Quite simply too expensive for a Gen3 drive, meaning there are few reasons to choose it over rivals.
★★☆☆☆ 1TB, $149 | samsung.com
Once the darling of PC builders everywhere, offering fantastic speeds at lower prices than the Pro range, the 970 Evo was the budget drive to buy. Unfortunately, it’s now relatively expensive, particularly for a PCI-E Gen3 drive.
Here, we’ve tested the 1TB version, although it’s also available in 250GB, 500GB and 2TB versions. As with other SSDs, the 250GB version is a little too small to be of use, so we’d avoid that drive and go with at least the 500GB model, if not larger. All versions have a DRAM cache, with the size dependent on the drive.
Not only is the 970 Evo Plus expensive for a Gen3 drive, it’s more expensive than PCI-E Gen4 drives, including the WD Black SN850, WD Black SN770 and the fastest sequential drives we’ve reviewed, the Seagate FireCuda models.
That makes the 970 Evo Plus a hard sell. In our benchmarks, the drive was towards the bottom of the table. In PCMark 10, the drive scored 1,535 in the System Disk test and 1,955 in the Data Disk test.
Results were similar with the AS SSD tests. In our sequential benchmark, the 970 Evo Plus managed 3,036MB/sec read speeds and 2,651MB/sec write speeds; in the random file tests, the drive achieved 1,934MB/sec read speeds and 2,380MB/ sec write speeds.
For the most part, bar the random test, the 970 Evo Plus is slower than the WD Blue SN570, which is a lot cheaper, and the Crucial P3 and Crucial P3 Plus drives.
Everything else about this drive is pretty much standard. The 1TB version is rated to last for 600TBW, which is the industry average. It means that the 970 Evo Plus will last for longer than you’ll realistically need the drive.
A lot could be forgiven if this drive were a lot cheaper. Indeed, over the years, we’d expect this drive to fall in price. Rather, the opposite has happened and prices have remained high. Paying premium prices for a drive like this just doesn’t make sense. If you’ve got a PCI-E Gen4 system, there are better choices; if you’re running PCI-E Gen3, there are cheaper and faster alternatives.
"The 970 Evo Plus is slower than the WD Blue SN570, which is a lot cheaper, and the Crucial P3 and Crucial P3 Plus drives."