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  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    That's a lot of "meh" in terms of performance for the high price.
  • Samus - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    I agree. It's basically tied with the WD Black in real world performance, but the WD Black sells for $70 less (500GB) or 40% less. That's pretty ridiculous.
  • Reppiks - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    The problem with Black is the naming, when I look in Danish shops they list 800MB/s writes so I presume thats an earlier generation? That makes it really hard to know what your buying when they dont have a WD Black 1gen, 2gen etc
  • moozooh - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    > The problem with Black is the naming
    That's racist.™
  • jtd871 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    I seriously can't tell if you're trying to sound clever or infantile.
  • peevee - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link

    He is succeeding at being funny. You have to be in the US context to understand why.
  • azrael- - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link

    You need to look specifically for "NVMe" as the new WD Black SSDs are postfixed "NVMe" instead of "PCIe". For instance, a search on the ProShop site yielded five drives for "wd black nvme" of which the three were postfixed "NVMe". These are the new ones and they are *considerably* more expensive. At least a 54% markup over the old versions.
  • FullmetalTitan - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Not sure where you are getting those price differentials from. WD Black and 970 EVO MSRPs are matched for every shared capacity.
  • peevee - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link

    newegg 1TB m.2 SSD prices:
    Crucial MX500 (SATA) $250
    HP EX920 (NVMe PCIe x4) $360
    Intel 760p (NVMe PCIe x4 )$400
    WD Black (NVMe PCIe x4) $450
    Samsung 970 EVO (NVMe PCIe x4) $600.
    960 PRO $609.

    Sams prices obviously need to CRASH before they make any sense.
    https://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx...
  • Samus - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link

    https://camelcamelcamel.com/Black-512GB-Performanc...

    WD Black 512GB NVMe had regularly sold for $150 on sale. Until the Samsung price drops in May, the EVO 970 500GB never sold under $200, and was regularely $220-$230.

    So my statement is 100% factual and correct as of the time or writing on April 25, and as of now:

    "WD Black sells for $70 less (500GB) or 40% less"
  • qlum - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link

    Just as a reminder how the argument against the ssd can change overtime:
    Right now the prices at least here in the netherlands are as follows:

    Crucial MX500 (SATA) €160
    HP EX920 (NVMe PCIe x4) €287
    Intel 760p (NVMe PCIe x4 ) €289
    WD Black (NVMe PCIe x4) €312
    Samsung 970 EVO (NVMe PCIe x4) €269
    Samsung 960 PRO €374

    Suddenly the 970 evo is the cheapest of the bunch this makes its value a lot better

    Of course there are still cheaper nvme ssds such as the intel 660p but at the tb mark its one of the cheapest nvme ssd's
  • modeonoff - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Isn't nvme m.2 SSD performance affected by Meltdown/Spectre patches?
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Yes, because storage benchmarks make system calls more frequently than almost anything else. Once the updates have been applied to the testbed, I'll be re-testing everything for future reviews. This will take a while, so I've waited until I have several reviews worth of testing completed that can fill the gap before I have new results for a new drive and the older drives it needs to be compared against.

    My preliminary tests of the impact of the patches show that while the scores themselves are affected, the rankings of drives aren't, so the current measurements are still useful for judging which drives are best.
  • Reppiks - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Could be nice to see AMD vs Intel post patches as it shouldn't affect AMD as much?
  • Infy2 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Nvme and Sata controllers are made by AsMedia on AMD's AM4 mother boards. Sadly they are somewhat slower than Intel's controllers. Even after Spectre and Meltdown patches Intel is still king of storage performance.
  • Tamz_msc - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Ryzen CPUs have a dedicated PCI-E x4 link for nvme drives which bypasses the chipset.
  • bernstein - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    nvme is just PCIe x4 + software... that's why a passive pcie x4 to m.2 works. and why a nvme m.2 ssd should work with reduced speed over PCIe x1 or PCIe x2. the same goes for PCIe 2.0 links... combine these and you get a working passive mPCIe to M.2 adapter.
  • willis936 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    NVMe controllers are made by Intel, AMD, and Microsoft (and whatever analog set of companies for mobile) because it's just a software stack that runs on CPUs.
  • Kwarkon - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Close but not exactly. You mean drivers.
  • HStewart - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    I personally think people are making a bigger deal of this Methdown/Spectre stuff than it worth it.

    Yes performance is one area - but there are other reasons why people purchase a product.

    Especially in heavy graphics or in this case storage usage - these patches should not have no minimal effect.

    To the average customer - the effect is not notice - how much will they notice a 5% or leas slow down in cpu speed. But change a hard drive to one of these SSD's would be a significant improvement
  • bji - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    You're kind of arguing against benchmarking in general here. Almost no benchmarks are directly relevant to any one person's intended use of the product. Benchmarks are not useful in that they tell me exactly how much performance to expect when running one specific program on one specifically configured hardware setup. They are useful because they allow extrapolation from measured results to expected results on workloads that actually matter to the reader.

    So I don't agree with your sentiment that Meltdown/Spectre are not worth consideration for their effect on system performance.

    However, I am not sure that I would include Meltdown/Spectre considerations in a specific SSD review. I think these considerations deserve to be in a CPU review.
  • bji - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Also, may I say that users generally will not notice a 5% slowdown in any particular task; however, we've already established that readers care about minimum differences in benchmark results, because they routinely call a 5% difference clear indication of a "winner" and a "loser" for that benchmark, so for the purposes of performance reviews, the 5% difference contributed by Meltdown/Spectre definitely matters.
  • Flying Aardvark - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    It's up to 50% reduction in storage performance not 5%. You'll feel 50% loss when it happens to you.
  • cmdrdredd - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    What you are saying is misleading. SATA performance is nearly identical (within 2% difference for me). It's NVMe drives that take the hit, but even still they are faster than everything else. Processor speed is unaffected for me as well. Tested multiple times with various benchmarks both ways and it was within margin of error. I don't see the problem to be honest.
  • LurkingSince97 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Tell that to my I/O intensive servers that suddenly have 30% less throughput.
  • modeonoff - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Yes but I am not an average customer. Performance is important for me.
  • Ryun - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    For everyday tasks do you guys notice an improvement in responsiveness of NVMe SSDs versus SATA SSDs?

    The transfer rates are definitely impressive, I've just never seen a review where I've wanted to upgrade my 500GB SATA SSD for development/gaming/maintenance tasks on my machine. Seems like boot times and opening programs are within a couple seconds of another between NVMe and SATA. Nothing like the jump between HDDs vs SSDs.
  • HollyDOL - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    I wonder myself, got Vertex 3 (240GB) and while not permanently watching perf counters I don't see much cases of 100% load. Wonder if I would be able to see a difference if I moved to some "best enthusiast m.2/pcie ssd available". (Rest of the machine is fully capable)
  • eek2121 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    I notice it in certain tasks. My system can get from cold boot to the login screen in about 3 seconds for instance. Editing video is much faster as well.
  • imaheadcase - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    I wouldnt say a huge performance, it really depends on certain tasks that you work with. If you work with file manager a lot with big files sure. But most people no. It makes sense if just upgrading though.
  • mapesdhs - Sunday, May 6, 2018 - link

    HollyDOL, as others have said, it very much depends on what you're doing. As a C-drive it simply helps to have any kind of SSD at all rather than a rust spinner (except of course the cheap junk knockoffs like Gloway). The Vertex3 was a pretty good SSD for its time (I have lots of them), though back then the Vertex4 presented its own significant bump up in benchmark performance, as did the Vector. For general use, you might notice some difference compared to an NVMe device, certainly in bootup times, but beyond that it depends on the task. Some games will certainly load a lot quicker, assuming the CPU/RAM are able to take advantage of it. And btw, some older mbds can have a mod BIOS installed to enable booting from NVMe (I'm more familiar with the options for ASUS boards in this regard), and certain NVMe SSDs even have their own boot ROM (eg. 950 Pro) such that native boot support isn't required.

    It's a good idea for video editing though, eg. the main cache/scratch drive for After Effects or Vegas.
  • Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Unless you work moving huge chunks of data (editing 4k for example) a lot there's no point going NVME over the Crucial MX500 sata.
  • Death666Angel - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Especially in cramped cases, small form factor stuff, the gum stick is really nice because you don't need annoying cables around. My next MoBo will be some Ryzen thing in mATX with 2 M.2 slots (likely PCIe and SATA), so I can go all SSD for my desktop without any cables. I haven't noticed improvements after going to SATA3 SSDs from my Vertex/Agility first gen ones.
  • iwod - Saturday, April 28, 2018 - link

    I can't disagree more. SATA is limited in Seq speed. And it is actually a user observable difference in everyday use, between a 1.5 - 2GB/s and 600MB/s speed.

    Now whether that is worth a little more money you paid for is a different question.
  • peevee - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link

    And how you are going to hit the seq speed in real life? All external (USB or network) sources and targets are slower. Writing does not matter with write-back OS caching. Reading a document into memory is limited by memory size and actually parsing/decompression of the document. Unless you are copying huge files between RAM drives and your SSD, you have no use case. That is why the tests are generating random data on the fly, like NOTHING does in real life. And that is why sites like AT have NO reproducible real-life tests (like compilation of a large software package for example, or recoding of video), as they would show about 0 real difference between drives 2x in price.
  • mapesdhs - Sunday, May 6, 2018 - link

    I see a nice difference when cloning my photo/video archive (1TB SM961), moving files around, network access, etc., to the extent I'm now looking into 10GigE.
  • Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    You don't see everyday benefits because the things that make SSD's faster than HDD's (access times, random 4k QD1 reads) barely improves from sata to nvme. Even with an optane SSD you won't see much improvement.
  • Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    1-SSD had 100x less access time vs HDD and 100x higher 4k random performance, NVME basically only improves on sustained transfer raters.

    Going from 5-10ms to 0.07ms and from 400KB/s to 40MB/s~ was a lot.
  • Cooe - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Yup. Without a doubt a good NVMe is much snappier, but you have to be the right kind of PC user for the difference to be that level of obvious. Even the heaviest applications, projects, etc... open instantly or near it vs the usual couple seconds, up to a minute or so for the really beefy crap with SATA-III, so if you're well familiar with PC's & in-tune with yours' level of performance, and are somebody who's regularly booting up, closing, and switching between multiple applications, storage heavy projects, etc... NVMe provides an obviously superior experience. And even if you aren't that kind of person yet, if you have compatible hardware the price gap has shrunk enough that I'd still recommend NVMe over SATA regardless as storage loads only ever increase with time. Aka you might not be the kind of person/PC user that can/will notice it now, but in a few years chances are that you most definitely will, and'll be glad you made the choice you did.

    For most lighter users atm otoh, SATA-III's already plenty fast enough for the workloads they regularly do. And that's on top of the fact that they simply don't have the level of "PC awareness" for the difference to stand out the way it does for heavy users and PC nerds like myself. And of course, even for us heavy users & multi-taskers who get real & significant benefits from the switch, it's still nothing on the order of the HDD to SATA SSD jump which is why those not well aware of their PC's current performance level and whom aren't heavy storage users (lots of regular & concurrent file access, movement, and modification) are rather likely to not notice the improvements w/o having them explictly pointed out (ala instantaneous or near it launches of most apps, even for multiples simultaneously vs delay's of a handful of seconds to a minute+ or so for the biggies, vastly improved file copy & movement speeds, ability to maintain SATA SSD levels of responsiveness while heavy storage workload(s) are active in the background, etc...)
  • Cliff34 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    For me, the higher premium prices for nvm ssd vs sata ssd is not worth for the performance gain. I'm sure a nvm ssd is faster but I don't want to shell out few hundreds dollars (comparing the 1td) more to have my computer a few seconds faster.
  • cfenton - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    I've been meaning to ask about this for a while, but why do you order the performance charts based on the 'empty' results? In most of my systems, the SSD's are ~70% full most of the time. Does performance only degrade significantly if they are 100% full? If not, it seems to me that the 'full' results would be more representative of the performance most users will see.
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    At 70% full you're generally going to get performance closer to fresh out of the box than to 100% full. Performance drops steeply as the last bits of space are used up. At 70% full, you probably still have the full dynamic SLC cache size usable, and there's plenty of room for garbage collection and wear leveling.

    When it comes to manual overprovisioning to prevent full-drive performance degradation, I don't think I've ever seen someone recommend reserving more than 25% of the drive's usable space unless you're trying to abuse a consumer drive with a very heavy enterprise workload.
  • cfenton - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Thanks for the reply. That's really helpful to know. I didn't even think about the dynamic SLC cache.
  • imaheadcase - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    So im wondering, i got a small 8TB server i use for media/backup. While i know im limited to network bandwidth, would replacing the drives with ssd make any impact at all?
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    It would be quieter and use less power. For media archiving over GbE, the sequential performance of mechanical drives is adequate. Incremental backups may make more random accesses, and retrieving a subset of data from your backup archive can definitely benefit from solid state performance, but it's probably not something you do often enough for it to matter.

    Even with the large pile of SSDs I have on hand, my personal machines still back up to a home server with mechanical drives in RAID.
  • gigahertz20 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    @Billy Tallis Just out of curiosity, what backup software are you using?
  • enzotiger - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    With the exception of sequential write, there are some significant gap between your numbers and Samsung's spec. Any clue?
  • anactoraaron - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Honest question here. Which of these tests do more than just test the SLC cache? That's a big thing to test, as some of these other drives are MLC and won't slow down when used beyond any SLC caching.
  • RamGuy239 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    So these are sold and markedet with IEEE1667 / Microsoft edrive from the get-go, unlike Samsung 960 EVO and Pro that had this promised only to get it at the end of their life-cycles (the latest firmware update).

    That's good and old. But does it really work? The current implementation on the Samsung 960 EVO and Pro has a major issue, it doesn't work when the disk is used as a boot drive. Samsung keeps claiming this is due to a NVMe module bug in most UEFI firmware's and will require motherboard manufactures to provide a UEFI firmware update including a fix.

    Whether this is indeed true or not is hard for me to say, but that's what Samsung themselves claims over at their own support forums.

    All I know is that I can't get neither my Samsung 960 EVO 1TB, or my Samsung 960 Pro 1TB to use hardware encryption with BitLocker on Windows 10 when its used as a boot drive on neither my Asus Maximus IX Apex or my Asus Maximus X Apex both running the latest BIOS/UEFI firmware update.

    When used as a secondary drive hardware encryption works as intended.

    With this whole mess around BitLocker/IEEE1667/Microsoft Edrive on the Samsung 960 EVO and Pro how does it all fare with these new ones? Is it all indeed a issue with NVMe and most UEFI firmware's requiring new UEFI firmware's with fixes from motherboard manufactures or does the 970 EVO and Pro suddenly work with BitLocker as a boot drive without new UEFI firmware releases?
  • Palorim12 - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Seems to be an issue with the BIOS chipset manufacturers like Megatrends, Phoenix, etc, and Samsung has stated they are working with them to resolve the issue.
  • jkresh - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    is a review of the HP EX920 coming?
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Yep, I have a sample of that on hand. I haven't tested it yet so it'll be a few weeks while I run it and several other drives through the post-Meltdown/Spectre patched testbed.
  • Luckz - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    You write that you use Windows drivers instead of manufacturer ones, but elsewhere I hear complaints that the PM981 isn't a very useful buy because it requires drivers that aren't even available to the public, only to OEMs. Wouldn't it make sense to also try these with Samsung drivers especially if they're being compared to the PM981 all the time?
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    The PM981 doesn't require any special drivers. It's just another standard NVMe SSD.
  • HStewart - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    I am curious what kind of performance would I see replacing the Hyrix 512G in my Dell XPS 15 2in1 with a 1G or possible 2G in a year.
  • Drazick - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Why do we need M.2 in desktop computer?
    Why should we live with this thermal compromise?

    We want SATA Express / U2 drives.
  • Cooe - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - link

    Yuck and yuck. SATA Express is 1/2 the speed, and a completely stillborn interface, and the cable dependant huge waste of space 2.5" U2 makes next to no sense outside the data center. The M.2 form factor has countless innate
    advantages over both those and any of it's potential thermal issues are easy & cheap to solve if you're particular setup happens to be vulnerable to their occurrence.

    Not only have Samsung's copper heatsink labels reduced the problem significantly w/o any user action, but most good current motherboards have included M.2 heatsinks and even for those that don't, they can be purchased online for ridiculously cheap.

    Now find me something braindead simple to install & use for just a couple $ that can make SATA Express twice as fast and actually used in drives, or make U.2 cableless and a fraction of a standard 2.5" drive's size. There isn't any.
  • medoogalaxy - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    superpower ssd
  • shatteredx - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Which is more important for “snappiness,” 4K random qd1 read or write?
  • sjprg2 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    Just because I hate the sata cables I now have all M.2 Samsungs installed either in the M.2 slots or on the PCIE plugin adapters. This also allows all of the trays to be removed from the chassis letting the front panel fans blow straight onto the motherboard and plugins.
  • jjj - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link

    The conclusion was shocking, nowadays when nobody has ethics and they just try to sell and sell and sell. What you did there is like telling people that a 500$ GPU is nuts and really, I have zero expectations for anyone to say something like that anymore. Today is all about manipulating people into being stupid and buying a politician or a product.
    You should make your own site, would be the only honest hardware review site on the planet. People are getting worse and worse in managing their money and parents, schools, the press are not doing anything about it.

    Congrats and thanks, I've missed seeing some sanity in a review.
  • peevee - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link

    Yep. Now if only they would start including any real-life test. Recoding a large video. Compilation of a software package. Decompressing a zip archive. I suspect they don't do it because they need to sell ads from large-margin manufacturers like Samsung.
  • hansmuff - Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - link

    If only you'd read the article properly and see what the Destroyer etc tests actually ARE.. they're explained in great detail. Follow the links. All of those things ARE IN THERE.
  • Urbanos - Sunday, May 6, 2018 - link

    Its annoying that your charts seem to have little consistency, from chart to chart one can't easily follow the comparison part for part. Older Anandtech articles never had this problem.
  • mapesdhs - Sunday, May 6, 2018 - link

    Billy, I think it would worth adding something in the article somewhere to explain why in several cases the 950 Pro still shows so strongly after all this time. I'm intrigued. I knew it could beat the 960 EVO, but even so, sometimes it's above the 970 and other unexpected newer models.

    Ian.
  • Stephan0711 - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - link

    960 pro 512 TB or 970 evo 500TB for desktop use / gaming? What do you guys think?
    Which benchmark represents this kind of usage?
  • ETHANH - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link

    My friend just got a 970 pro 1TB yesterday, after we tried it out. I like my HP EX920 better, similar performance, much cheaper prices.
  • Abad - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link

    Hi Friends,
    My pocket allows for the 512GB only and I was waiting results from the 970 and the EX920 before I write this: Toshiba RD400 512GB is the one to go for. If you factor in: price, performance and warranty, its unbeatable. To see 2016 MLC technology competing with Q2 2018 tech and winning must ring bells. Its no rocket science. The RD400 uses the more expensive and faster MLC cells, but because it comes from 2016, it is selling same price as the cheaper and slower TLC cells used in today's SSDs. You can't have a safer bet, can you?
    But then, I heard some talk that OCZ SSDs go south but even that wont deter me from going for the RD400. What do you think?

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