Skip to main content

Samsung’s latest 970 EVO SSDs offer stellar performance with a price to match

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The humble M.2 solid state drive is easy to overlook — after all they’re only about the size of a stick of gum.

Recommended Videos

M.2 drives typically live on your motherboard somewhere, tucked away on the back or hidden away under all the other hardware in your PC. And it’s a shame, because some M.2 drives — like Samsung’s 970 EVO — deserve a lot more attention than they get.

Spoiled for storage

With all the cloud storage options we have available to us, it’s easy to take storage for granted. Our phones have between 128GB and 256GB of space, while Google, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox and dozens of other companies offer gigabytes upon gigabytes of cloud storage for free. That’s great for sharing documents, photos, and other files between devices but cloud storage can’t do everything. When you need to store files locally, for gaming, photo/video editing, or just to keep them close at hand, your choice of hard drive or solid state drive matters.

How quickly your computer can serve up those files, move them around, or make them accessible to powerful software suites like Adobe Premiere, can bottleneck your everyday performance and that’s where Samsung’s 970 EVO drives come in.

Quick and quicker

Image used with permission by copyright holder

We tested both the 500GB and 1TB models of the 970 EVO, and both drives performed beautifully. Even the massive 1TB model managed to maintain read and write speeds upwards of 2.5 GB/s (gigabytes-per-second). Specifically, the 500GB model hit read speeds of 2,738 MB/s and write speeds of 2,494 MB/s. Meanwhile, the 1TB model hit slightly higher read and write speeds: 2,765 MB/s, and 2,503 MB/s respectively. The differences in speed here are more than likely just the natural variation between SSDs rather than any indication that either drive is truly quicker than the other.

Just look at the kind of speed we saw out of the previous generation Samsung 960 PRO. In the Origin Neuron gaming desktop, the 512GB 960 Pro hit an impressive read speed 2,557 MB/s, and write speed of 1,987 MB/s. It’s important to point out that these are great speeds, but look at how they compare to the 870 EVOs. That’s a huge performance jump in just one generation. To clarify, even a decent mechanical hard drive will only hit a fraction of these speeds. We typically see read and write speeds around 150 MB/s for mechanical drives.

So, it’s impressive that the 1TB model is just as quick as its smaller sibling. That means this tiny stick-of-gum-sized hard drive can offer incredible speed, and massive amounts of storage space without the need for a backup mechanical drive.

That’s good news for a couple reasons. First, because who doesn’t want to slim down the interior of their desktop PC? Second, because it shows that M.2 drives aren’t just for operating system partitions or occasional use. The 970 EVO proves you don’t have to sacrifice speed for storage space. You’ll just have to pay a little extra for it.

Tricky pricing

Samsung’s best SSDs have never been cheap and there’s a reason for that — they’re quick, spacious, powerful, and among the best on the market. We’ve come to expect storage to be cheap because it’s typically disposable — like those free cloud storage accounts we all use. Mechanical hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper as SSDs slowly start to take their place in the market. Go search any electronics retailer for “1TB hard drive,” and chances are you’ll find one for under $50 bucks. It’s not going to be fast or small (or maybe even reliable), but it’ll be cheap.

Samsung’s 970 EVO SSDs are the opposite: They aren’t cheap, but they are small, quick, and reliable. The 970 EVO lineup starts at $120, for the 250GB model, $230 for the 500GB, $450 for the 1TB model, and $850 for the 2TB model. That’s not exactly cheap, but you get what you pay for here.

The TB 970 EVO will last you a very long time. It’s going to be a couple years at least before we start treating terabytes like gigabytes. Chances are, if you invest in a Samsung 970 EVO SSD, it’s going to be going strong long after your GPU and CPU start to show their age.

Jaina Grey
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jaina Grey is a Seattle-based journalist with over a decade of experience covering technology, coffee, gaming, and AI. Her…
Your politeness toward ChatGPT is increasing OpenAI’s energy costs 
ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode on a smartphone.

Everyone’s heard the expression, “Politeness costs nothing,” but with the advent of AI chatbots, it may have to be revised.

Just recently, someone on X wondered how much OpenAI spends on electricity at its data centers to process polite terms like “please” and “thank you” when people engage with its ChatGPT chatbot.

Read more
Intel Nova Lake CPUs may require new motherboards with LGA 1954 socket
A render for an Intel Arrow Lake CPU.

Intel’s upcoming Nova Lake-S desktop CPUs, rumored to launch in 2026, could introduce a brand-new LGA 1954 socket, marking yet another socket change for the company's consumer platform. According to leaked shipping manifests and documentation from NBD.ltd shared by VideoCardz, Intel has begun distributing early test kits labeled "NVL-S" — a strong indication that motherboard vendors and partners are already preparing for the next generation of CPUs.

The LGA 1954 socket would feature 1,954 electrically active contact pins, which is a notable jump from the current LGA 1851 socket used with Arrow Lake desktop CPUs. The total pin count could exceed 2,000 when debugging or non-functional pins are considered, and the larger socket may support new I/O features, increased power delivery, and more advanced chiplet designs.

Read more
LG’s latest smart monitor can roll on wheels, but needs a power plug
LG Smart Monitor Swing press image

LG has come up with the Smart Monitor Swing, a unique mobile display that combines a 31.5-inch 4K UHD IPS touchscreen with a stand featuring built-in wheels. Designed for users who prioritize portability, the Swing is said to be a follow-up for LG’s StanbyME portable screen. 

Unlike the StanbyME, there is no built-in battery as the monitor comes with a dedicated power adapter, a questionable choice since one would be restricted by the length of the power cord itself.

Read more