Samsung 970 Evo Plus

A hard-wearing SSD that comes in a wide range of sizes, but it struggles to stand out

SCORE

PRICE 500GB, £61 (£73 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sam1

READ SPEED 2,604MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 2,318MB/ SEC

Samsung’s 970 Evo Plus comes in a broad range of sizes, from 250GB up to 2TB. Whichever you choose, the price works out to about 15p/GB – not awful value, as long as the performance is there.

In our tests, however, the 970 Evo Plus struggled to distinguish itself. With its PCI Express Gen3 connection, it was never going to compete with the latest top-speed contenders, but we were disappointed to see sequential read and write speeds merely on par with the 1TB Kingston KC2500 – a drive that’s considerably cheaper on a per-gigabyte basis.

Indeed, when we fired up the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, the 970 Evo Plus fell behind the Kingston, with a system disk score of just 1,693 and a data drive score of 1,935. To be fair, we’re comparing drives of different sizes here, but Samsung’s figures indicate that all capacities of the

970 Evo Plus should perform almost identically (see pcpro.link/324sam7).

On the plus side, write endurance is as good as you would want it to be, with the 1TB model certified for 600TBW. There’s also built-in 256-bit AES encryption, and support for the Opal and IEEE-1667 standards – reassuring for IT managers and techies. The latter will also appreciate the Samsung Magician software, which lets you configure drive encryption, inspect technical data and run benchmarks.

For us, though, that’s not enough to save the day. There’s nothing wrong with the Samsung 970 Evo Plus, but most of what’s right with it is matched by the Kingston KC2500 at a lower price.