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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.
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.
...the price!
EVO:
$119.99 (48Â/GB) 250 GB
$229.99 (46Â/GB) 512 GB
$449.99 (45Â/GB) 1TB
$849.99 (42Â/GB 2TB
PRO:
$329.99 (64Â/GB) 512GB
$629.99 (62Â/GB) 1TB
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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.
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I think unicode support would have made your post better but that's just my 2Â. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Just ordered a new 960 last Friday so of course a faster one is coming.
Does anybody even care about SSD speed any more?
In real terms these incremental improvements are just meaningless numbers now. Manufacturers should focus on reliability/durability instead.
No sig today...
Well, for SATA, you can't have faster SSDs. We've hit the max for SATA3 for at least a few years now (540MB/s). So the 800 series SSDs from Samsung are basically incremental improvements as they've hit max speed years ago.
And I'm pretty sure the durability issue has been a non-issue, especially with Samsung SSDs - a test done took 2 years of constant 24/7 writing on the smallest 830 Pro at the time (64GB?) to finally die. The larger SSDs simply have more blocks to go through.
Hell, out work has switched everyone to PCs with SSDs in them, and we've had no failures in the past couple of years since we've started issuing SSDs. And they aren't babied - these SSDs are used in developer PCs compiling actively. We've even put them in our nightly build machines where they compile and build on the SSD itself (the build is then archived to an HDD). The biggest problem we've had is the HDDs in developer PCs often die first (we do a 512GB SSD + 4TB HDD combination).
As for reliability, Samsung had problems with their 830 EVOs a while back, but since they they've been rock solid. I can't say for other SSDs (We've had one Intel 320 SSD die and lose all its data, but it was revived doing a secure erase. And the SSD died because the user dropped the laptop and said laptop ended up in pieces on the floor. This was back when SSDs didn't necessarily have power outage protection).
Heck, Samsung used to warrant their SSD Pro series for 10 years, something the IT director and I thought was ridiculous - mainly because the SSD would be horribly obsolete and the machine decommissioned by then. Nor do we anticipate users wearing out their SSDs anytime soon. I did an analysis and even after 3-4 years of use, the SSDs in my PCs have barely any wear on them