SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2 2280 1TB $155

BigSJW wrote: ↑ Rated at 3400/2500, you may want to take a look at the newly released 980 for another $10 you get 3500/3000 compared to the now 2 years old 970.

https://www.amazon.ca/Samsung-980-Gen3- ... B08V83JZH4

alwaysbuylow wrote: ↑ In technical specification the write speed is a littler faster, in real world there won't be any noticeable difference, for people on budget and want to get the lowest price good and reliable SSD, 970 is a good choice, it will be up to people to decide if it is worth to pay the extra $10 for no noticeable difference in real world.

BigSJW wrote: ↑ Rated at 3400/2500, you may want to take a look at the newly released 980 for another $10 you get 3500/3000 compared to the now 2 years old 970.

https://www.amazon.ca/Samsung-980-Gen3- ... B08V83JZH4

As with any entry-level NVMe SSD, the performance story for the Samsung SSD 980 is a bit complicated. Compromises have to be made to keep costs low while still offering good peak performance. On lighter, easier tests, peak performance can be competitive with high-end PCIe Gen 3 drives like the Samsung 970 EVO Plus, especially when the larger SLC cache can give the SSD 980 the advantage.

The DRAMless nature of the SSD 980 means that performance can suffer under any workload that hits a lot of data, even if it's mostly or entirely reads instead of writes. Fortunately, the threshold for "a lot of data" in this context is tens of GB, which is far more than most everyday tasks involve. Stuff like full text searching of the entire drive without an index, or some antivirus scans will be noticeably slower than on a mainstream TLC drive with DRAM. But for the most part, the DRAMless design means that the drive still has decent performance where it counts, and sacrifices performance where it probably won't be missed.

Compared to its most important competitor, the year-old WD Blue SN550, the Samsung SSD 980 clearly hits better highs but also has more serious pitfalls. Both drives are DRAMless SSDs optimized for workloads that don't handle too much data at once. When a workload strays outside those limits, the WD Blue SN550 is the clear winner that holds up better under heavier workloads. Which of the two drives is preferable will largely come down to pricing.

Samsung is trying to market the SSD 980 as something of a successor to the 970 EVO. This is definitely a stretch, even if they both reach similar peak performance on the spec sheet. The SSD 980 is clearly a lower class of drive than Samsung's recent high-end PCIe Gen 3 drives.

alwaysbuylow wrote: ↑ In technical specification the write speed is a littler faster, in real world there won't be any noticeable difference, for people on budget and want to get the lowest price good and reliable SSD, 970 is a good choice, it will be up to people to decide if it is worth to pay the extra $10 for no noticeable difference in real world.

Jep4444 wrote: ↑ Do not use sequential speeds as a reason to buy a product. The 980, on the whole, is a vastly inferior product to the 970 Evo. It's DRAM-less and relies on some tricky caching algorithms that boost performance in metrics that are generally meaningless for consumers but look good on paper (like maximum sequential speeds). It's off cache performance is also abysmal. On a full disk write (not a real world use scenario but a nice extreme test to show what's happening), a 980 has an average write speed of 512.6MB/s, that is slower than an 870 Evo which came in at 516.1MB/s, an SN550 which came in at 843.2MB/s and the 970 Evo Plus (i don't have the score for the regular Evo in front of me, but it won't differ by a lot) came it at an average of 1652.7 MB/s.

Anyways, to take an excerpt from Anandtech's review of the 980.



Basically, long story short, it's a competitor for the SN550 and not priced like it. I can not think of a single person I'd advise buying the 980 over when the 970 Evo is $10 cheaper. For most users, an SN550 is more than good enough. Anyone who needs more, the 980 just isn't that answer.

BigSJW wrote: ↑ Thanks for the response. That makes a lot of sense given some of the benchmarking I've seen. I'm on a PCIE 3 CPU right now and I'm looking for the best off cache performance. Would you have the numbers for 980 Pro VS SN850? I don't think either of these comes close to the PCIE 3 bottleneck.

Jep4444 wrote: ↑ It's not no noticeable difference, I can easily devise tests than the 970 Evo will spank the 980 in. The opposite is not true. The extra $10 is money VERY poorly spent.

puzz wrote: ↑ Does anyone have a good suggestion on the PCIe card for this drive? My motherboard only has PCIe 2.0 x16.

Jep4444 wrote: ↑ It's not no noticeable difference, I can easily devise tests than the 970 Evo will spank the 980 in. The opposite is not true. The extra $10 is money VERY poorly spent.

Jep4444 wrote: ↑ Do not use sequential speeds as a reason to buy a product. The 980, on the whole, is a vastly inferior product to the 970 Evo. It's DRAM-less and relies on some tricky caching algorithms that boost performance in metrics that are generally meaningless for consumers but look good on paper (like maximum sequential speeds). It's off cache performance is also abysmal. On a full disk write (not a real world use scenario but a nice extreme test to show what's happening), a 980 has an average write speed of 512.6MB/s, that is slower than an 870 Evo which came in at 516.1MB/s, an SN550 which came in at 843.2MB/s and the 970 Evo Plus (i don't have the score for the regular Evo in front of me, but it won't differ by a lot) came it at an average of 1652.7 MB/s.

Anyways, to take an excerpt from Anandtech's review of the 980.



Basically, long story short, it's a competitor for the SN550 and not priced like it. I can not think of a single person I'd advise buying the 980 over when the 970 Evo is $10 cheaper. For most users, an SN550 is more than good enough. Anyone who needs more, the 980 just isn't that answer.

Jep4444 wrote: ↑ There won't be a big difference between a 970 Evo Plus and a 980 Pro on PCIe 3. The NAND is a bit better in the 980 Pro so off cache performance will be a bit better but they're both excellent performers off cache. Off cache performance appears to be better on the Evo Plus than the regular Evo as well (I just found the whole disk write, for the 970 Evo, it's 1269MB/s, which is actually worse than the SN750 but not by much, I'd say the two drives are somewhat comparable). I can't find SN850 performance numbers at PCIe 3 (to be fair, I didn't look very hard lol). As for the SN850 vs 980 Pro, 980 Pro performs better off cache and sequentials in general. Keep in mind though that off cache performance is not sensitive to PCIe 3/4 as the NAND in TLC mode is not fast enough to saturate the bus. Now why you care about off cache performance is another question entirely, unless you're working with huge files. Of course if off cache performance is the priority, you can see the 970 Pro is still king thanks to it's MLC NAND.

Anyways, Anandtech's review of the 980 Pro is where you can find comps of all the Samsung drives including PCIe 3 performance on a 980 Pro, and here's their review of the SN850 if you wanna compare it to the 980 Pro (they do not provide either drive's PCIe 3 performance here)

3express wrote: ↑ Do we need to rush now to buy the 970 Evo/Plus?

Basically just wondering if Samsung is going to discontinue the 970 lineup or is there potentially more room for the price to drop in the future?

Actually question applies for all of the PCIe 3.0 drives, are they all going to be discontinued soon in favour of the PCIe 4.0 drives or will they stick around on the market?

BigSJW wrote: ↑ My apologies for going off-topic.

Looks to me from Anandtech's review of the SN850 that in almost every benchmark it's able to beat the 980 Pro, and 970 Evo & Plus by a significant margin. Yes, my use case deals with working with very large files. Ram is always limited on a database, and frequently the database will load and unload parts of the database back and forth between memory and disk swapping more frequently used data.
Given that the 980 Pro is $255, SN850 is $249, 970 Evo is $159, 970 Plus $219 would you still say the 980 Pro is better for off-cache performance?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16505/th ... d-review/3

Harold91 wrote: ↑ Again, Anandtech did not even have a 970 Evo on hand to review and instead trying to extrapolate the results of their 970 Evo Plus, which the 980 is NOT COMPETING with to try and justify.

Anandtech even summed this up with:

"Samsung is trying to market the SSD 980 as something of a successor to the 970 EVO. This is definitely a stretch, even if they both reach similar peak performance on the spec sheet."

Yes the SSD 980 non-pro is a cheaper drive of SSD. Why? Because the market for high end PCIe 3.0 NVME m.2 drives is not there anymore. They can make SSD that are just as fast, if not faster in certain aspects like 4K then their previous drives and offer for less. Remember the 980 just came out. Soon it'll be on sale like this 970 Evo which has taken 2-3 years to get this low. The 980 offers you the same 600tbw/endurance, similar sustained write speeds. What more does anyone want? There likely won't be a 980 Evo for this reason.

They again also write this in their review too:

"Fortunately, the threshold for "a lot of data" in this context is tens of GB, which is far more than most everyday tasks involve. Stuff like full text searching of the entire drive without an index, or some antivirus scans will be noticeably slower than on a mainstream TLC drive with DRAM. But for the most part, the DRAMless design means that the drive still has decent performance where it counts, and sacrifices performance where it probably won't be missed."

The average consumer trying to go from their HDD to an SSD or to go from a 256gb ssd they may have to a 1tb, won't really miss the benefits of having the DRAM. Beyond they very first time they are moving say 40gb of folders over and over.

https://www.pcgamer.com/samsung-980-1tb-ssd-review/

Another good review. All things being equal, I wouldn't pay MORE for the 980 over a 970 Evo which is why I bought the 970 Evo from Amazon. But again I wouldn't say it's some crap inferior product. It's just where the market is in the era of PCiE 4.0 drives.

Harold91 wrote: ↑ Fair point. I saw better reviews on youtube showing consistent 3500/2700 ish speeds in benchmarks.

I do think a nice pricepoint for the 980 needs to be maybe $129-$139. I also myself picked up the 970 Evo a few days ago as well. We also are a bit spoiled now. Reality is, it was insane to think of 1TB SSD the size of your finger giving you these kinds of read and write speeds a few years back for less than $160 CAD.