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Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB
- baldfat 9y agoI just changed my work video editing workstation order. I will have two 970 EVO NVMe for my OS and Project drives. There actually is a bottle next with raw 4K, 5K and 8K Video and playing it in an editor.
- copperx 9y agoI'm curious about the specs required to edit raw 4K video. What's your workstation order like?
- baldfat 9y agoHere is a great article for Davinci Resolve (Industry standard for color grading) https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/DaVinci-Resolve-14-GPU-Scaling-Core-i9-vs-Xeon-W-vs-Dual-Xeon-SP-1121/#4KMedia-LivePlaybackFPS(RAWDATA) https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/DaVinci-Resolve-1... The issue is after you have done a few processes on the video for color balance and grade things can just grind to a halt.
- Rafuino 9y agoI searched through the article and didn't see much discussion at all on storage as a bottleneck. If it actually is a bottleneck, is color grading more of a sequential or random data access workload?
- dragontamer 9y agoIt doesn't seem like the 970 Evo is much faster than the 960 Evo. They're still faster than all of the competition (aside from super-expensive Intel Optane). So its not a big deal. But there are some reviews that show the 960 Evo winning some performance tests out there.
- the8472 9y agoPCIe SSD cards can provide more bandwidth and IOPS, but for those prices you might as well RAID0 several M.2 sticks.
- dragontamer 9y agoYour terminology is slightly off, so I'm not entirely sure what you mean. M.2 is a form-factor, which can be NVMe (PCIe-based) or SATA-based. Yeah, a bit confusing but M.2 supports two different protocols. If you mean RAID0 SATA drives (in the M.2 form factor), well the processor's south-bridge has a lower limit compared to the direct-to-CPU connections most NVMe drives get. SATA is great for bulk storage: either cheaper SSDs (~$250 for 1TB for MX500) or big hard drives (~5TB Toshiba Hard Drives for $150). But for maximum performance, you have to go NVMe. After all, RAID0 NVMe drives will simply perform better than RAID0 SATA. --------------------- Case in point: the Samsung 970 Evo has a specified read bandwidth of 3700 MB/s. The SATA3 connector has a maximum speed of 600MB/s theoretical (and in practice, SSDs only achieve ~550 MB/s). So you'll need SIX RAID0 SATA drives to keep up with this single Samsung 970 Evo. Assuming your southbridge can even sustain 6x RAID0 (probably not. In my experience, south-bridges seem to slow down dramatically by 3x RAID0). All you need to do with the 970 Evo is go RAID0 2x 970 Evo to achieve performance that no SATA RAID array will ever touch.
- the8472 9y agoI am aware of the distinctions, I thought it would be obvious from the context. I meant to compare a 2x m.2 NVMe RAID0 with dedicated NVMe add-in cards, e.g. a kingston dcp1000. The latter can outperform the former per unit but seem more expensive even when you adjust for the higher stats.
- dragontamer 9y agoI think I see what you mean now. M.2 NVMe drives are electrically PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes. Since laptops are such a popular form factor, it seems like all the best technology and mass-production is favoring M.2 drives. Its clear to me that older physical PCIe drives are just going obsolete in terms of price/performance now. PCIe drives (the ones that physically went into a x4, x8, or x16 slot) are a dinosaur at this point. It seems like the "serious" datacenter technology is converging upon U.2 drives (which are also PCIe 3.0 x4 slots, except over a cable). Its been a bit rocky these past few years: Sata-Express (2x PCIe), U.2, M.2 SATA, M.2 NVMe, and "physical PCIe" SSDs. But the industry is finally converging into something of a standard. M.2 NVMe is the high-performance part for consumers, especially the laptop market. While U.2 for servers who need large capacity and benefit from the physical presence of a wire connection.
- joenathanone 9y agoI really wish there was a little more effort put into this "article", the 970 PRO and EVO spec tables aren't very useful. They would be a lot more helpful if they included the 960 versions for direct comparison or even if they were side by side so the EVO and PRO could be directly compared.
- veesahni 9y agoreal benchmarks are here: https://hothardware.com/reviews/samsung-ssd-970-evo-and-pro-review https://hothardware.com/reviews/samsung-ssd-970-evo-and-pro-...
- baybal2 9y agoWhite plastic on a controller microchip? Few month ago I saw an orange chips on Mediatek devkit. A new trend it seems?
- jhpankow 9y agoWell it is a 3D rendering, and that color might suggest the device has a metal heat spreader not a colored plastic molding.
- joezydeco 9y agoThe Anandtech review says it's nickel plated. The sticker is also a copper heat spreader: "The Samsung Phoenix controller introduces a nickel-coated heatspreader, and the 970 EVO retains the copper foil layer in the label on the back of the drive that was introduced with the 960 generation, but there are no more serious cooling measures on the drive."
- baybal2 9y agoOh, I'm such an inattentive reader.
- rhn_mk1 9y agoThe PRO table doesn't specify any RAM in it. Does it mean that it's not going to lose data on power loss?
- garmaine 9y agoSLC caching, so hopefully not? But I think you’d have to test this.
- amluto 9y agoI have no idea whether Samsung uses it, but the NVMe spec allows a device to request use of host memory for caching. It’s considered a low-end feature, since it’s slow and inherently volatile. It’s called “host memory buffer” for those who are curious.
- ahjaiM7r 9y agoVolatile is ok, as long as it honors barrier commands.
- amluto 9y agoI think the bigger issues are bandwidth and power consumption. If software is doing heavy IO, it doesn’t really want to have to contend with the HMB for PCIe and memory bandwidth. Also, a DRAM chip is a DRAM chip. I’d rather pay a couple dollars for a local DRAM chip in the NVMe device than a couple dollars for extra host RAM that will be permanently reserved for the HMB.
- Everlag 9y agoFor those looking, here's the full anandtech review that also came out today. [0] @dang maybe change the link as the review is a superset of the announcement. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12670/the-samsung-970-evo-ssd-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/12670/the-samsung-970-evo-ssd...
- dang 9y agoSure, changed from https://www.anandtech.com/show/12674/samsung-announces-970-pro-and-970-evo-nvme-ssds https://www.anandtech.com/show/12674/samsung-announces-970-p.... Thanks! (It's best to email hn@ycombinator.com to tell us things, though — I only saw this by accident.)
- whitepoplar 9y agoDo these drives feature power-loss capacitors? I'm still wondering why most manufacturers think it's okay to offer SSDs that lose data on power loss (!!)
- nik736 9y agoWhat are you wondering about? They can squeeze more money out of businesses because it is sold as enterprise feature.
- nine_k 9y agoI really wonder why a $10 capacitor add-on (a capacitor, a diode, two connectors) plugged in between main board power supply and a disk power receptacle is not a common item. Or maybe it is, but I have no idea?
- marshray 9y agoA common minimum voltage requirement for the nominal +5V supply is 4.5 V. Let's assume a voltage below that won't damage the drive, but it won't operate. The diode is going to drop 0.6V, leaving you with only 4.4 V max for the drive. Then the capacitor is going to immediately start dropping in voltage as soon as you start pulling the stored energy out of it. So, in practice, to do a quality job of this it will probably need a DC-DC converter. These aren't necessarily expensive, but definitely more complicated than the old diode trick.
- nine_k 9y agoThis makes sense! OTOH low-drop diodes do exist [1], and the drive likely needs just a (small) fraction of a second to flush the caches; it's SSD, not need to wait for the disk to rotate to the right position or move heads. I suppose the power loss signal from the controller still propagates, even if the computer's PSU plug is just yanked out of socket. [1]: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/282471/9909 https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/282471/9909
- 9y ago
- gautamb0 9y agoHoping this reduces used 960 EVO/PRO prices. Not a whopping improvement.
- MrMember 9y agoI bought a 500GB 960 EVO on sale for $200 last week. Now I know why it was on sale.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jerf 9y agoOn an only sort-of related note, has anyone found a USB (or anything else external) adapter that can read these yet? I know why it's hard, and I know about the ones that read that form factor but not NVMe drives, and why that is. Just curious if my searches are coming up dry because they don't exist or because they're getting flooded by the results that match the search but don't work. I enjoy the performance of the drive I have but it makes me nervous that the only thing in my house that can read it is the laptop it is in. If push came to shove I could create some options, but the best would be a stand-alone reader, like you can get for basically every other kind of storage tech.
- 21 9y agoIf you have a desktop you can buy a $10 PCI express adaptor for it.
- nfriedly 9y agoJust add a $250 thunderbolt 3 enclosure and ta-da: USB (connector) NVMe reader!
- quizme2000 9y agoI've used the one made by startech, $30 on Amazon. Speed is always going to be limited, but they do work. I've used it only for general IT work doing data transfer, backups or upgrades where the host system didn't work or support multiple M.2 connections.
- eumoria 9y agoAs another user stated Startech makes one and I use it as a technician. It's not fast at all... it's mainly for recovery when you don't have a motherboard with an available M.2 slot you can still pull the data off it. For that purpose it does the trick. The drive is capable of speeds 100x above USB 3.0 so there really isn't good to use that bus for anything other than emergency. - Here is an image of the circuit it uses (ASM1163E Controller) https://i.imgur.com/ZmwppR4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZmwppR4.jpg - I can't find that IC anywhere but here's the closest thing: http://images.100y.com.tw/pdf_file/35-Asmedia-ASM1042A.pdf http://images.100y.com.tw/pdf_file/35-Asmedia-ASM1042A.pdf PCI-E to USB 3.0 host bridge. Hopefully that helps.