I’ve seen as low as 90MBps, but that’s rare anymore (except for 4-bit QLC–see the 860 QVO review). Once cache has run out, performance on all TLC drives drops. One thing to note about the performance is that 3-bit NAND, when written natively as such (it can be treated as 1-bit or 2-bit NAND with a corresponding increase in performance), isn’t all that fast. The plain copy test times will vary according to capacity, due to different cache sizes and other related factors. Note that the numbers below are from the 500GB drive we tested. The 970 EVO Plus (green bars) is indeed quite a bit faster than the plain EVO (gold bars) in several ways, especially with sustained writes to the main body of NAND and 4K writes when lots of queues are in play. Samsung also claims that the 970 EVO Plus is more power-efficient than its predecessor, though that’s something that generally only interests pros who run lots of them in arrays or servers.

It’s been quite a while since I saw an SSD fail, and I’ve yet to write enough data to one for it to lose capacity. Don’t be surprised if you don’t hit that write figure even in 10 years, or if the drive lasts longer than that. The 970 EVO Plus carries a nice five-year warranty and is rated for 150TBW (TeraBytes Written) per 250GB of capacity over the life of the drive.

Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus in its 2TB capacity, which isn’t shipping yet according to the company’s PR. There are 1TB PCIe x4 NVMe drives out there that are pushing the 15-cent mark, though without delivering the same level of performance. At 25 cents per gigabyte in the largest capacity, and a little bit more in the lesser capacities, those are good prices. The 970 EVO Plus is available in 250GB, 500GB (the capacity we tested), and 1TB flavors for a $90, $130, and $250, respectively.

Owc aura pro x2 vs samsung 970 evo plus