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Samsung SSD 970 Pro & Evo Released

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If those prices are correct, it will also help their competition (like Western Digital newest NVMe drive) drop in price as well, so hopefully 2018 will be the year we at least see some price wars in this market. Samsung really had no true competition since they entered the NVMe market, but several competitors have truly caught up with them (at least the performance/heat/power consumption is much closer).
 
XabanakFanatik said:
I hope no one's bought any of the drives yet, Samsung hid the old product pages in their webstore and listed the drives in new pages with prices that are very different from the announcement prices and what I started to see at retailers with product already.

970 Pro: 1TB/512GB $499.99/$249.99

970 Evo 2TB/1TB/500GB/250GB $799.99/$399.99/$199.99/$109.99
Click to expand...
The article is up.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12718/samsung-posts-lowered-msrps-for-970-pro-and-970-evo-ssds
 
All I can say is it's about time.

I was quite upset seeing the 970 line at identical MSRPs to the 960 line. The increase in density moving to 64 layer V-NAND should have lowered the price some, and the expensive stacked DRAM packaging the 960 Pro had to employ that was used as justification for its premium over the 960 Evo is no longer present.

I am extremely pleased with the new prices and I feel it's a start to changing the landscape to embrace NVMe and higher performance drives as the norm.
 
If Newegg has them they won't show me. 970 searches and going directly to Samsung SSDs show me no 970.

I did hit the bhphotovideo link though and grabbed one, thanks for that.
 
Still using 2x 950 pro 512gb in my editing machine. No reason to change quite yet. Would be nice to have larger drives though but what I have is fine for now. All completed projects get offloaded onto normal magnetic drives anyway.
 
rchunter said:
Still using 2x 950 pro 512gb in my editing machine. No reason to change quite yet. Would be nice to have larger drives though but what I have is fine for now. All completed projects get offloaded onto normal magnetic drives anyway.
Click to expand...

That brings up an interesting point. Aside from the inevitable gains in capacity will the 960 pro ever be noticeably outperformed by a future product?

I would assume that SSDs based on PCIe gen 4 will get there for sure but strictly sticking to PCIe gen 3, are we far enough into diminishing returns that a new build is the only way to justify buying the current best SSD?

I just bought a 970 pro and it is going into a new build. I will not be replacing my 950 and 960 drives in the other systems because the gain in performance just wont be tangible.
 
nosirrahx said:
That brings up an interesting point. Aside from the inevitable gains in capacity will the 960 pro ever be noticeably outperformed by a future product?

I would assume that SSDs based on PCIe gen 4 will get there for sure but strictly sticking to PCIe gen 3, are we far enough into diminishing returns that a new build is the only way to justify buying the current best SSD?

I just bought a 970 pro and it is going into a new build. I will not be replacing my 950 and 960 drives in the other systems because the gain in performance just wont be tangible.
Click to expand...

I imagine we're getting close to maxing out the performance of MLC and SLC-cached TLC. Marginal improvements each generation for the top end drives will probably continue for a while, but even with the 970 series true random iops are barely improved.

Optane's performance definitely has led to pressure on the SSD manufacturers to improve performance in their weak points - random iops and mixed read/write performance. The new WD Black Nvme drive and the 970 series both show interesting performance gains in some of those areas.

I think it would be interesting to see a new Z-NAND based product slot in at the old Pro pricepoint to give a new high performance halo drive, but that probably won't happen anytime soon.
 
XabanakFanatik said:
Optane's performance definitely has led to pressure on the SSD manufacturers to improve performance in their weak points - random iops and mixed read/write performance.
Click to expand...

Optane is a cool but frustrating product. I have a 900P, the 905P is going into my next workstation build as the OS drive. These things are amazing but I have a hard time recommending them due to the annoying trifecta of price, capacity and form factor.

Optane could get away with a limited price premium if the capacity and form factor were more in line with current industry standards.

I wonder if Intel could move Optane software into the firmware portion of a SSD and make an all in one hybrid product. Imagine something like a 970 pro but with 4KQ1T1 speed like Optane? Capacity and crazy fast speed under all use cases, sign me the hell up.
 
Optane Form factor is a non-issue with the M2>U2 drives, which is what I use.
But yeah, of course I’d love a true M.2 gumstick 905p level-performing 1TB drive for $499.
 
Brahmzy said:
Optane Form factor is a non-issue with the M2>U2 drives, which is what I use.
Click to expand...

Even though I have the same setup, I do not agree. One system has a 950 pro, 0 SATA devices. It is super clean and cable management is almost nonexistent.

My system with the 900P U.2 has 2 cables to route and I needed to install a SATA power cable for this one single device.

If you read the complaints the lack of a pure M.2 900P annoys a lot of people.
 
nosirrahx said:
If you read the complaints the lack of a pure M.2 900P annoys a lot of people.
Click to expand...

The single biggest issue is the pricing, not form factor.

I doubt Intel is going to lower the relative price of Optane significantly in the short term. The 905P is a slightly higher performing drive with a higher price.

Their NVMe division guy, made it clear that they want to segment the two. 3D NAND for increased capacity and market-leading perf/$, 3D XPoint for continued performance improvement and more form factors.

For the market they are aiming for, the DIMM form factor is where it should shine. Sure it might be pricey, but the performance should be justified. And it'll actually be used because DIMMs are used for compute and actually affect performance and where specs really matter(Better throughput doesn't impact your frames per second for example). In storage, once you have SATA SSDs, you've got most of the benefits.

I would assume that SSDs based on PCIe gen 4 will get there
Click to expand...

PCIe Gen 4 does nothing special in areas where you won't benefit from an NVMe drive over SATA.
 
IntelUser2000 said:
PCIe Gen 4 does nothing special in areas where you won't benefit from an NVMe drive over SATA.
Click to expand...

Directly maybe not but you know that as it approaches that controller development will move towards the gen 4 standard. Imagine the sequential speeds of a gen 4 drive, it might not be super critical to real performance but people like buying stuff with big performance numbers.
 
Curious to see Samsung’s answer to Optane. You know they’re working on something with crazy random read performance. But, it’s taken 10+ years to get anything with good random reads, so it might take them a while longer.
And in the same way, I’m not sure if Optane’s random reads can improve a whole lot past what they’re getting out of it.
 
Just got my 970 Pro. Installed RS4 from a Sandisk Extreme Pro 3.1, fastest Windows 10 install I have ever seen.

I will post up some CDM benches with both the default MS driver and that new V3 Samsung driver, see if it actually makes a difference.
 
Found a bug with Dell XPS laptops that support NVMe. Their default BIOS configuration seems to block Samsung software from seeing their drive.

Both the driver and Magician tell me that the drive is not supported. Seems others had this issue so I am changing modes and reinstalling. I'll report back sometime tonight.
 
Top 2 are from MS native NVMe driver, bottom 2 are from Samsung NVMe driver V3.

7d1Sj0b.jpg

UQhGeNJ.jpg
 
Brahmzy said:
^^ Nice!!

Looks like that driver really boosts the 4k randoms.
Click to expand...

Kind of looks that way but I would love to see other before and after benchmarks, maybe someone here will use the 970 as a storage drive instead of an OS drive.

A little more info about the actual Dell XPS BIOS bug. This system (and from I am reading many others) come with SATA set to RAID mode, even though there literally are 0 SATA drives installed. While this does not sound like an issue it ends up screwing up the interface between Windows and the NVMe drive so badly that it is impossible to get Samsung's software to see their own drive. I even force installed the Samsung driver directly and after reboot it still was not being used. The solution is simple enough, just change the SATA mode from RAID to AHCI. If you have already installed Windows the system will be unbootable with a BSOD so starting fresh AFTER this change is advised. There likely is a way to force a driver swap and avoid the reinstall but I didn't bother since the install is so bloody fast.
 
My 1TB 970 Pro gets here Thursday and it’s a storage drive on a 1803 8700K @ 5.0GHz. I’ll take some benches n post.
How much power mgmt did you disable?
Did you completely disable any and all C-states, SpeedStep etc?
 
Brahmzy said:
My 1TB 970 Pro gets here Thursday and it’s a storage drive on a 1803 8700K @ 5.0GHz. I’ll take some benches n post.
Click to expand...

Perfect 🙂
Brahmzy said:
How much power mgmt did you disable?
Did you completely disable any and all C-states, SpeedStep etc?
Click to expand...

This is 100% bone stock install with latest CU integrated into RS4. I might do some additional testing after tweaking tomorrow.
 
I can't find the 970 Pro anywhere in Canada yet.

Anyone know where or when they might be available in Canada?
 
Got mine, installed it. It says 400GB because I always carve out a smaller volume (over provision). Bout the same performance as expected from above.

7efb9737a54aa150f002cb9a9f2d7d0b-full.jpg


Here's an Optane 900p running on the same box as the OS disk.
54ca48100b88388b2a371bf48f1a9d2d-full.jpg
 
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