Samsung Announces 970 PRO and 970 EVO NVMe SSDs (anandtech.com)

hyperclocker shares a report from AnandTech: Samsung has announced the third generation of their high-end consumer NVMe SSDs. The new 970 PRO and 970 EVO M.2 NVMe SSDs use a newer controller and Samsung's latest 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory. The outgoing 960 PRO and 960 EVO were first announced in September 2016 and shipped that fall, so they have had a fairly long run as Samsung's flagship consumer SSDs. Compared to its predecessor, the 970 EVO promises a small improvement in sequential read speed, and a more substantial boost to sequential write speed for all but the smallest 250GB model. Peak random access performance is also substantially improved, but again the 250GB model gets left out, and is actually rated as slower than the 960 EVO 250GB. The warranty on the EVO has been extended from three years to five years, and the write endurance ratings have been increased by 50% to retain almost the same drive writes per day rating.

The 970 PRO's performance specs aren't too different from the 970 EVO. Many of the ratings are the same, and the ones that differ are mostly better by just 3-11% for the PRO. There are just two major exceptions to this. First, the PRO doesn't rely on SLC write caching so it can maintain its write speed far longer than the EVO. Second, the rated write endurance of the 970 PRO is twice that of the EVO, going from just over 0.3 Drive Writes Per Day to 0.6 DWPD. Neither of these are an important factor for ordinary consumer use cases, but they help the 970 PRO retain some shine as a premium product.

Comments

Neat but... slash those prices.

[Kjella]

Cheapest HDD I can buy here in Norway at the moment: 4TB for 799 NOK = ~$20/TB before VAT, cheapest SSD is 1911 NOK for 960 GB = ~$200/TB before VAT so still 10x and it's been that way for a while. The Samsung EVO 960 price was almost flat for its entire lifetime, same if I look at the Crucial MX300 which has also been around a good while. Sure better warranty, endurance, performance and consistency is nice but the data still has to fit. I miss the old days when computers got twice as good for half the price every 18 months or whatever the latest bastardization of Moore's law was. RAM prices have tripled from the bottom in 2016. GPUs have gone nuts on the crypto craze. You actually got a better computer for the same money a few years ago than you do today, except maybe the CPU where Ryzen has made some ways.