The latest iteration of Samsung's flagship internal consumer solid-state drive (SSD) is the SSD 970 Pro ($449 for 1TB, as tested), and it follows in its predecessors' footsteps of offering incredibly fast read and write speeds.
In fact, the SSD 970 Pro's performance in many scenarios is the fastest we've encountered in an M.2 SSD, which makes it one of the best choices (but not the only excellent one) for a high-end internal SSD.
If you're building a cutting-edge gaming system or multimedia editing workstation, the Pro or the Editors' Choice Samsung SSD 970 EVO will serve you well.
For mainstream upgraders and pretty much every other SSD shopper, a handful of other M.2 PCI Express SSDs offer performance nearly as good for much lower prices.
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A New Flagship Sails
Samsung's consumer SSDs are split into EVO and Pro lines.
The Pro models offer the absolute best performance and reliability ratings, at higher prices.
The EVO drives have slightly lower prices, and their rated reliability and speeds mostly come down to differences that consumers building a PC for use at home shouldn't worry about, for instance, the use of two-bit MLC memory for the SSD 970 Pro versus three-bit TLC memory for the SSD 970 EVO.
(For an explanation of these and other SSD-related terms, see Buying a Solid-State Drive: 20 Terms You Need to Know.)
The EVO and Pro drives are both available in either the gumstick-shaped M.2 variety, which is the shape of this SSD 970 Pro drive, or the larger 2.5-inch SATA type.
The SATA drives are called the SSD 860 Pro and SSD 860 EVO.
The M.2 drives use the cutting-edge PCI Express NVMe interface, which offers roughly six times more throughput than does the SATA interface.
If your motherboard has a vacant M.2 slot that supports the PCI NVMe interface, filling it with a drive like the SSD 970 Pro is likely to be the single most impactful performance improvement you can make to your PC, since its vacancy is an indicator that the computer is using either a SATA SSD (slower) or a SATA hard drive (much, much slower).
Unfortunately, as with many cutting-edge technologies, NVMe drives tend to be expensive, and the SSD 970 Pro is one of the most expensive of the bunch.
In addition to our $449 1TB version, Samsung also offers a $229 512GB version.
Those are your only two choices, since Samsung has dropped the 2TB capacity that it offered with the previous-generation SSD 960 Pro.
That's fine, though.
Unless you absolutely need the maximum-possible single-SSD capacity, 2TB SSDs aren't cost-effective even now that prices have matured.
Unless your laptop or tiny desktop has no space for a second cheaper hard drive, your wallet will thank you for buying a lower-capacity SSD and a higher-capacity hard drive to use in tandem.
If you absolutely must have 2TB of screaming-fast storage, Samsung offers the SSD 970 EVO in a 2TB configuration.
That drive also comes in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB flavors.
Pushing SSD Speed Into the Red
Like with most component upgrades, you'll get the most bang for your buck if you are upgrading from an SSD made several years ago (say, before 2016), assuming your PC supports PCI Express NVMe drives to start with.
Samsung rates the SSD 970 Pro's maximum sequential-read speed for 3,500MBps and its maximum sequential-write speed at 2,700MBps.
(Interestingly, both capacities of the SSD 970 Pro are rated for the same speeds, unusual in a world in which SSD speeds usually scale up with capacity.) This is undeniably fast, but the read speed is identical to the SSD 960 Pro's spec.
The write speed is 600MBps faster, but when you're already writing data at more than 2,000MBps, a few hundred megabytes per second isn't going to consistently speed up app switching, copying folders, or other storage-intensive tasks.
Performance benchmarks tell a more nuanced story, whose moral is that the SSD 970 Pro is, in fact, lightning-quick.
While the SSD 970 Pro didn't quite manage to hit its 3,500MBps sequential-read ceiling on our performance benchmarks, its result of 3,286MBps on the Crystal DiskMark 6 benchmark sequential test is awfully close.
But people who like to compare their SSD speeds with other dinner-party guests will be disappointed to know that it isn't the fastest drive we've tested on this test.
That honor actually belongs to its little brother, the SSD 970 EVO, which clocked in at a marginally faster 3,372MBps.
At 3,129MBps, the competing WD Black NVMe SSD isn't far behind either, nor is the previous-gen SSD 960 EVO (3,169MBps).
The SSD 970 Pro's sequential-write speeds tell a similar story.
I clocked it at 2,738MBps using Crystal DiskMark, although that's slightly slower than the WD Black NVMe SSD's 2,783MBps.
Samsung has made several improvements to achieve the SSD 970 Pro's higher sequential-write speeds.
The drive is made up of NAND memory cells stacked vertically in 64 layers, compared with 48 layers in the 960 series.
Samsung refers to this arrangement as V-NAND and claims that the move to 64 layers provides more than a 30 percent "productivity gain," thanks in part to the use of smaller, more reliable memory cells.
In addition to improvements in V-NAND, the SSD 970 Pro's other main source of performance gains is a revised controller, which acts as a sort of traffic cop for data flowing between the SSD's memory modules and the rest of the system.
In addition to firmware improvements, Samsung's new Phoenix controller also has a thin layer of nickel coating, which dissipates heat to help keep the drive at maximum speeds for longer periods of time.
Excellent Real-World Performance
As impressive as the SSD 970 Pro's sequential-read and -write speeds are, they don't necessarily reflect how fast the drive will feel in everyday use.
Consider the drive's results on our Crystal DiskMark and AS-SSD 4K tests.
A drive's 4K performance, particularly 4K write performance, is an important factor in how fast you can boot up your PC and launch programs.
The SSD 970 Pro aced all four tests, but as with sequential speeds, it was just slightly faster than the WD Black NVMe.
It managed 260MBps on the Crystal 4K write test and 52MBps on the 4K read test, compared with the WD Black NVMe's 4K reads of 43MBps and 4K writes of 247MBps.
See How We Test SSDs
In practice, then, the SSD 970 Pro's performance is still the fastest when it comes to everyday use, but the actual throughput, as measured in megabytes per second, is much lower than the sequential-read speeds advertised on the box, and still neck-in-neck with the competing WD Black NVMe .
This does not reflect poorly on Samsung, however, since nearly all SSDs share this difference between sequential and random read and write speeds.
For the ultimate demonstration of how little a real-world performance difference there actually is between high-end NVMe drives, consider PCMark 8's Storage benchmark.
The SSD 970 Pro achieved a score of 5,100 on this proprietary test, which simulates via "traces" how a drive handles word processing, web browsing, and other common activities.
Meanwhile, the Black NVMe managed 5,065 and the SSD 960 EVO recorded 5,060.
In everyday use, these levels of performance would be indistinguishable.
Reliability Ratings: A Look Inside
When it comes to rated reliability, the SSD 970 Pro still offers a considerable advantage over its competitors, but one that isn't likely to matter to most consumers.
Samsung says the 1TB-capacity version of the SSD 970 Pro can withstand a total of 1,200 total terabytes written (TBW).
That's up from 800TBW for the 1TB SSD 960 Pro, while the 1TB WD Black NVMe is rated at 600TBW.
Endurance is determined, in part, by the capacity of the drive, so SSDs with lower capacities will wear out faster, all else being equal.
Still, we consider 10TB to be a rough estimate of the amount of data a heavy power user might write to a boot drive in a given year.
So even if you somehow managed to double that, the 1TB SSD 970 Pro should theoretically withstand decades of use, lasting far longer than the rest of your PC, until a time that 1TB SSD capacities are passe.
Despite the excellent TBW rating, though, Samsung doesn't quite reflect that confidence relative to its EVO drive in its warranty coverage by, say, offering a decade-long warranty on the Pro model.
The excellent five-year warranty period on the SSD 970 Pro is the same that the WD Black NVMe and SSD 970 EVO offer, further evidence that reliability of either drive isn't a factor to consider for most buyers.
Samsung does have a distinct advantage when it comes to bundled software, however.
The Magician drive-management app is full-featured and easy to use.
It's a one-stop shop for everything from firmware updates to performance tweaks to performing secure erases.
Western Digital's software offers many of these same features, but in general, I find the Samsung Magician app to be more user-friendly.
I tested the SSD 970 Pro with the software installed to ensure the latest firmware version was present, but all of the performance settings were left at their defaults.
Like the SSD 970 EVO but unlike the WD Black NVMe, the SSD 970 Pro includes AES 256-bit hardware encryption (configured via the Magician app) for added peace of mind if you misplace your laptop. And it's an excellent choice for installation in a laptop: Samsung estimates the drive's average power consumption at 5.7 watts, so it will likely have a much smaller impact on battery life than the WD Black NVMe, which is rated to consume 11 watts, on average.
A Stellar SSD at a Premium Price
With its performance and reliability neck-in-neck with that of the WD Black NVMe and the SSD 970 EVO, the SSD 970 Pro is competing in a space that's much more crowded than it was in 2015, when Samsung dominated the nascent NVMe SSD market.
The SSD 970 Pro's price is therefore much more relevant.
At $449 for the 1TB version, or 45 cents per gigabyte, it misses the 40-cent-per-gigabyte threshold of what we consider reasonable to spend on a high-end SSD.
The WD Black NVMe hits the 40-cent mark dead-on, at $399 for 1TB, while the SSD 970 EVO is even more affordable, at around 35 cents per gigabyte for both the 1TB and 500GB versions.
Ultimately, the real-world performance differences between the SSD 970 Pro and competing drives like the WD Black NVMe are pretty minimal.
Add in the SSD 970 Pro's limited capacity choices, and the result is that most consumers, even speed freaks like competitive gamers and pro video editors, should give the more affordable (and Editors' Choice-award-winning) Samsung SSD 970 EVO slight preference unless they know they will push their drives hard enough to need the Pro's superior reliability.
Pros
View MoreThe Bottom Line
By several measures, the Samsung SSD 970 Pro is the fastest consumer-grade internal M.2 solid state drive you can buy, making it an excellent choice if you want the absolute best storage for your screaming PC build or upgrade.
