With the 970 Evo, Samsung launches an NVMe-SSD for end users. The drive, which is lying in front of us in this case, performs extremely well pumping out up to 3400 MB/s sequentially reading and 1500 MB/s sequentially writing. This definitely makes us wonder how much of that horsepower is available in real life.

Specifications / Delivery

Model	Samsung 970 Evo M.2 250 GB	Samsung 970 Evo M.2 500 GB	Samsung 970 Evo M.2 1 TB
Capacity	250 GB	500 GB	1 TB
Form Factor	M.2 (2280)	M.2 (2280)	M.2 (2280)
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x4	PCIe 3.0 x4	PCIe 3.0 x4
Protocol	NVMe	NVMe	NVMe
Controller	Samsung Phoenix ARM 5-Core	Samsung Phoenix ARM 5-Core	Samsung Phoenix ARM 5-Core
Memory	3D V-NAND 64 layer	3D V-NAND 64 layer	3D V-NAND 64 layer
DRAM	512MB LP DDR3	512MB LP DDR3	1GB LP DDR3
Throughput	3400 MB/s sequential read 1500 MB/s sequential write 200'000 IOPS 4K random read 350'000 IOPS 4K random write	3400 MB/s sequential read 2300 MB/s sequential write 370'000 IOPS 4K random read 450'000 IOPS 4K random write	3400 MB/s sequential read 2500 MB/s sequential write 500'000 IOPS 4K random read 450'000 IOPS 4K random write
Endurance	150 TBW	300 TBW	600 TBW
Power Consumption	5.4 Watt active 0.5 Watt idle	5.7 Watt active 0.5 Watt idle	6.0 Watt active 0.5 Watt idle
Warranty	5 Years	5 Years	5 Years
Price

Samsung has been amongst the first companies which launched an NVMe SSD for end users. NVMe or NVM Express stands for Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCI). These specs define how solid state drives are being accessed through the PCI Express bus and therefore directly communicate with the CPU. NVMe replaces AHCI in the case of SSDs and it brings quite a few advantages to the table. AHCI, or Advanced Host Controller Interface, was optimized for drives with low throughput and high latencies. Apart from that it could not deal with high parallelism, being limited to a queue depth of 32. NVMe on the other hand has been designed to leverage the benefits of SSD from ground up, which means it can deal perfectly with low latency and high throughput drives. Apart from that it supports another magnitude of parallelism, whereas the queue depth can reach up to 65536. Since SSDs are based on controllers, which usually feature between eight and ten channels, parallelism is a key factor in gaining more performance.

Having a closer look at the specs we see that Samsung claims the 250GB 970 Evo M.2 can reach up to 3400/1500MB/s sequential read/write speeds, which is simply a new level when it comes to the desktop market. Although the high level of performance and the good space available, this drive comes with a solid price. While the 250GB costs 88 Euro, the 500GB and 1TB models cost 160 and 320 Euro respectively. A closer look at this M.2 expansion card shows, Samsung is using their 5 core ARM controller in the Phoenix version as well as second generation V-NAND memory. Therefore 64 layers of NAND flash memory are being stacked. At the moment Samsung is selling the 250GB, 500GB and 1TB models. At a later stage, the 2 Terabyte drive is going to be available as well.