Samsung 970 Pro 512GB

Www.samsung.com $198

The Samsung 970 Evo is such a fast drive that for many the 970 Pro seems almost pointless. However, if you’re after the ultimate in performance and longevity, it’s the drive to get.

Its use of MLC NAND means you don’t get any drop in write performance like you do with TLC drives— they rely on a cache of faster NAND to create a write buffer. If you continuously write more data to the drive than the size of the buffer, write performance drops. Here, however, the drive just keeps chugging along.

That MLC NAND also results in a far longer life for the drive. You get double the write endurance with the 970 Pro compared to the 970 Evo, which is already much higher than most value SSDs.

Then of course there’s performance. You’re not actually getting that much faster a drive here than the 970 Evo, especially in sequential performance, but there is still an advantage top be had.

Unfortunately, that advantage is just too small for this drive to make sense for most of us. For gaming it’s overkill of the highest proportion. You will only need this level of performance and longevity for very specialist tasks, and bragging rights.