Samsung launches 970 Evo/Pro NVMe M.2 SSDs

As one of the key memory chip manufacturers on the market right now, Samsung is offering both volatile and non-volatile storage solutions. Most of Samsung’s RAM chips are implemented by other brands in their products, and only a small part gets sold by Samsung itself, but when it comes to storage products like SSDs and NVMe solutions, Samsung prefers to sell all the products directly to end users. As prices for the faster PCIe SSDs are dropping considerably this year due to the plentiful availability of NAND flash, Samsung is now refreshing its mainstream lineup with the 970 Evo and Pro models.

Since the new models are part of the mainstream offer, the read/write speeds are not the highest, but still high enough for mid-range solutions. Both 970 Pro and Evo models come with a NVMe 1.3 Phoenix controller, are compatible with the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, and come in the M.2 form factor. The memory integrated in these two models is Samsung’s 64-layer 3D V-NAND MLC, which can yield sequential read/write speeds of up to 3,500 MB/s and 2,00 MB/s, respectively.

While the Pro model is a bit faster when it comes to write speeds, it only comes in 512 GB and 1 TB capacities. The Evo model comes in 250/512 GB and 1/2 TB capacities. Other new features include 50% increased endurance, amounting up to 1,200 TB written, a new system dubbed Dynamic Thermal Guard, which protects against overheating together with a custom heat spreader, plus improved data encryption via the Opal 2.0 stamdard.

The new 970 NVMe SSDs will begin shipping on May 7 with prices starting at US$119 for the 256 GB Evo model and US$329 for the 512 GB Pro model.

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