Samsung Electronics introduced few high-speed solid state drives (SSD) storages, 970 PRO and 970 EVO series. These devices were created for home users, enthusiasts, and professionals.
The drives are executed in M.2 2280 form factor: the dimensions are 22 x 80mm. These storage drives belong to NVMe 1.3 type devices. NVM Express (NVMe) is a certification that allows an SSD to communicate with the system via PCI Express bus (in this case PCIe 3.0 x4). This process accelerates the communication with the system, assisting even higher read and write speeds and reducing the delays in data handling.
The 970 PRO solutions are based on Samsung 64L V-NAND 2-bit MLC flash memory microchips. This allows to achieve up to 1TB of storage (the models come in 512GB and 1TB). The read (sequential) and write speeds reaches 3500 and 2700 MB/s accordingly, while IOPS (input/output operations per second) reaches 500 000 during random read and 500 000 during random write processes.
The 970 EVO uses Samsung 64L V-NAND 3-bit MLC flash memory microchips. Although it supposes to be an inferior family, the difference in performance is minimal, and even, on the contrary, it provides larger storage capacity – up to 2TB. Sequential read and write reach 3500MB/s and 2500 MB/s, while IOPS is 500 000 (random read) and 480 000 (random write).
Both 970 PRO and 970 EVO come with 5-year warranty. The prices start at £275 (PRO) and £194 (EVO). Taking into the account that many modern systems have an empty M.2 slot, this could be a perfect upgrade for a computer.