Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 MZ-V7S500BW 500 GB

Evolution "plus"

Samsung's dominance in the SSD market is more than justified: over the past years, the company has been offering the best SSDs that are ahead of the competition in terms of performance, as well as in terms of support and reliability. Thank you for this is to say a closed production cycle, which allows the company to independently produce memory modules and controllers. As a result, over the years of testing, such a situation has developed that almost every new Samsung EVO SSD line becomes the yardstick by which everyone else is judged.

Maximum speed for PCI-E 3.0x4 bus

But last time the process was broken and the Samsung 970 EVO turned out to be just a very good, but never a reference drive. Therefore, the Koreans decided to remind who is the boss in the house, and released an improved version of the 970 EVO with the Plus prefix. The novelty is based on the same branded Samsung Phoenix controller, but almost all speed indicators have increased significantly. First of all, 3200 MB / s are striking during sequential writes. It used to be 2300 Mbps. That is an increase of almost one and a half times. Random access copy and write IOPS increased by an average of 20%. The increase is not revolutionary, but very tangible. And it is he who returns Samsung to the pedestal, it simply does not have such fast competitors on the PCI-E 3.0x4 bus. And the next 980 EVO will apparently squeeze the juice out of the fourth generation PCI-E.

Slightly more expensive than the regular 970 EVO

Another question is that in reality these improvements will pass by the majority of users, few people will sit with a timer and note the Windows boot time or drive 200-300 GB archives from disk to disk. And in the PCMark 8 tests, which are as close as possible to real usage scenarios, the new product does not get ahead too much, and in some places even lags slightly behind. But here is the honor and praise of Samsung, which did not raise the price tag, leaving it actually at the level of the standard 970 Evo. However the regular 970 Evo can be caught on sale, while the 970 EVO Plus is definitely not worth waiting for discounts. Therefore, the choice here is between a simply excellent and fast SSD, and a slightly faster one for comparable money. In the meantime, it's better to wait a bit, look at the price dynamics and evaluate whether the new Samsung flash memory will perform as reliably as the previous generation. If there are no problems, then the new Samsung drives can definitely be recommended for purchase. Their workmanship is of the highest quality, and a five-year warranty gives confidence in the future.