The Mainstream Phoenix Rises: Samsung's 970 EVO (500GB & 1TB) SSDs Reviewed
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12670/the-samsung-970-evo-ssd-review [www.anandtech.com]
2018-05-17 18:37
The Intel SSD 750 was the first to bring the large performance benefits of NVMe to the consumer market. It was soon eclipsed by the Samsung 950 PRO, which offered much better real-world performance thanks to better optimization for consumer workloads - the Intel SSD 750’s enterprise roots were still quite apparent. When Samsung introduced the 960 PRO and 960 EVO generation, performance jumped again thanks in large part to their much improved second-generation NVMe controller. The 970 EVO brings another generation of new controllers and NAND flash, but huge performance jumps aren’t as easy to come by. We’re closing in on the limits of PCIe 3 x4 for sequential read speeds, and there’s not much low-hanging fruit for optimization left in the NVMe controllers and how they manage flash memory. Samsung’s 3D NAND is still increasing in density, but we’re not seeing much improvement in performance or power efficiency from it.
That leaves Samsung having to make tradeoffs with the 970 EVO, sacrificing power efficiency in many places for slight performance gains. Since almost any consumer would find the 960 PRO and 960 EVO to already be plenty fast enough, this means the 970 EVO is not at all a compelling upgrade over its predecessors.
Have we reached peak SSD?