Samsung 1TB 970 Evo Plus M.2 NVMe SSD

If you need the extra speed for bulky I/O like editing large videos, or swapping data that can't fit into memory, the 970 EVO works well. Otherwise I think SATA is sufficiently fast for most things and is in some ways more convenient. However for typical smaller work loads, such as booting, or starting typical applications, you might not notice the difference. For example, my desktop boots about 1 second faster using the 970 EVO MVMe than my SATA Samsung 850 EVO SSD - so it turns out the small reads and writes made during booting are not the principle bottleneck. For normal applications I can't tell the difference when running from the 970 EVO MVMe versus the 850 EVO SSD.I've found MVMe is great for swap because swap may require masses of big writes. if I drive my ... MoreIf you need the extra speed for bulky I/O like editing large videos, or swapping data that can't fit into memory, the 970 EVO works well. Otherwise I think SATA is sufficiently fast for most things and is in some ways more convenient. However for typical smaller work loads, such as booting, or starting typical applications, you might not notice the difference. For example, my desktop boots about 1 second faster using the 970 EVO MVMe than my SATA Samsung 850 EVO SSD - so it turns out the small reads and writes made during booting are not the principle bottleneck. For normal applications I can't tell the difference when running from the 970 EVO MVMe versus the 850 EVO SSD.I've found MVMe is great for swap because swap may require masses of big writes. if I drive my desktop heavily into MVMe swap, it's still responsive enough for me to take action to bring memory use back under control.NVMe also requires dealing with small screws, plus considering heatsinks if the MVMe is badly placed for airflow. As I understand it, adding a heatsink would void Samsung's warranty. Apparently the sticker on the drive is already some kind of heat conductor, plus the NVMe will automatically throttle back on speed if it gets too hot. SATA SSD's are relatively free of cooling issues and pretty easy to install.I was considering using this as compact storage for a raspberry Pi 4, but MVMe requires more power than SATA, so I'd have to add a powered USB-hub. So if you're picky about energy efficiency, SATA SSD may be the way to go.I'll take the win of faster swap, but in many ways I see MVMe as a failed experiment on my part. SATA was already good enough, maybe I should have put the money toward more RAM or a faster CPU.

Danyal's review of Ssd 980 Pro M.2 2tb Pcie4.0x4 Nvme 1.3 W/heatsink

Pros: The Samsung 980 Pro is simply a crucial asset to any prosumer who transfers large files constantly. The speed is top tier by leveraging PCIE 4.0 (is also backwards compatable with pcie gen 3). For gamers, it can also be an asset if you have a top tier build and want the best performance possible out of every component. Installation is very simple, just refer to your motherboards manual if unsure. Samsung also has their software, Samsung Magician. This allows you to configure multiple aspects of the SSD to tailor to your needs and run benchmarks. Overall, this is a high end m.2 and delivers what you expect for the price. Would recommend for any prosumer who manages large files and values every second of their time, or gamers looking for the best of the ... MorePros: The Samsung 980 Pro is simply a crucial asset to any prosumer who transfers large files constantly. The speed is top tier by leveraging PCIE 4.0 (is also backwards compatable with pcie gen 3). For gamers, it can also be an asset if you have a top tier build and want the best performance possible out of every component. Installation is very simple, just refer to your motherboards manual if unsure. Samsung also has their software, Samsung Magician. This allows you to configure multiple aspects of the SSD to tailor to your needs and run benchmarks. Overall, this is a high end m.2 and delivers what you expect for the price. Would recommend for any prosumer who manages large files and values every second of their time, or gamers looking for the best of the best.Cons: The SSD delivers on what it portrays, so no improvement points. I feel the price is reasonable when compared to other SSDs of the same storage and same speed class.

Died in 9 months, samsung aren't talking to me

Died in 9 months, samsung aren't even talking to meDrive was great for 9 months and then just stopped being able to write - so total OS lockup. Managed to recover my data but can't write to disk and there are several dead blocks so the drive is effectively dead.Spoke to customer service and they said all the right things, told me it would be replaced and the RMA team would be in contact.A month later and no contact. Nothing! Several long waste of time calls to customer service - just ask me to wait. They can't even find a reference number for the RMA team's progress.Samsung's warranty appears to be garbage. 9 months of a 5 year warranty and I not have a drive to use for my research. I've bought a lot of Samsung products over the last few years and I thought ... MoreDied in 9 months, samsung aren't even talking to meDrive was great for 9 months and then just stopped being able to write - so total OS lockup. Managed to recover my data but can't write to disk and there are several dead blocks so the drive is effectively dead.Spoke to customer service and they said all the right things, told me it would be replaced and the RMA team would be in contact.A month later and no contact. Nothing! Several long waste of time calls to customer service - just ask me to wait. They can't even find a reference number for the RMA team's progress.Samsung's warranty appears to be garbage. 9 months of a 5 year warranty and I not have a drive to use for my research. I've bought a lot of Samsung products over the last few years and I thought buying a premium product would have meant they would honour their warranty but here we are. $600 bucks in the toilet.Currently looking to replace the drive at my own expense. Maybe a Crucial drive this time?

Easy installation, didn't need thermal padding.

Installed this on my ASUS G531GT laptop, replacing the Intel 660p 512GB it came with.Installation was simple, I wasn't going to clone my existing drive, so I made a windows 11 usb boot drive, removed my old nvme, installed the new one and closed the case on my laptop. Plugged in the usb and turned it on, computer instantly asked me to install or repair windows, I installed it and it took less than 5 minutes to get to the desktop screen. Everything works perfectly.In regards to the thermal pads.. None seem to be required. I downloaded and reinstalled 200GB+ of games, updated all the drivers and played a game after downloading for about 3 hours. Samsung Magician Software (Extremely recommend downloading) said the temp of the NVMe never went past 51°c and stayed in ... MoreInstalled this on my ASUS G531GT laptop, replacing the Intel 660p 512GB it came with.Installation was simple, I wasn't going to clone my existing drive, so I made a windows 11 usb boot drive, removed my old nvme, installed the new one and closed the case on my laptop. Plugged in the usb and turned it on, computer instantly asked me to install or repair windows, I installed it and it took less than 5 minutes to get to the desktop screen. Everything works perfectly.In regards to the thermal pads.. None seem to be required. I downloaded and reinstalled 200GB+ of games, updated all the drivers and played a game after downloading for about 3 hours. Samsung Magician Software (Extremely recommend downloading) said the temp of the NVMe never went past 51°c and stayed in the "normal" temperature range the entire time.So, for me at least, thermal pads were not required at all. If you were to do heavier disk operations then maybe you'll need them. But for average use, installing things and playing games, the temp won't be a problem.Also, for speed purposes. I did not check the read and write of the intel 660p before replacing it. Games load the same quick speed prior to what I had from the 660p. Realistically I bought this for the 2TB aspect and it being on sale for $229. HOWEVER. Bios boot time (according to Task Manager) was a consistent 5-5.4 seconds. I know the 660p was about 7 seconds. So if that boot speed difference matters to you, this is a solid upgrade. But if you are doing this for game loading speed.. Just about all NVMe will have the same speed.Overall this was definitely worth it. $229 for a 2TB NVMe with easy installation and access to Samsung Magician showing all the information on your NVMe temperature, read and write speed etc is definitely worth the price.

Happy at first, now frustrated with unreliability.

Bought this less than a year ago and was very impressed with the performance. All of a sudden one day windows wouldn't boot up. Swapped out another hard drive and reinstalled windows on that instead. Booted it up, detects the 970 Evo 1tb in the bios, but when I go to windows there is nothing. Was able to open the drive momentarily through "this pc" but nothing could be opened or moved or changed. Tried to format and would not let me. Drive is set to read only and I cannot take it off. Samsung magician detects it and its running a scan now, getting all sorts of bad sectors. Trying to figure out how the warranty works on this because this drive should not be dead already.

Really good performance for its price

For $199 plus tax, I would say the 2TB Samsung 970 evo plus is really good for it's price. It's a better value than sata ssd's of the same value and price. It's a couple less cables to deal with which is nice.Arrived pretty quickly and box was in good condition, barely any scratches or scuffs. Unboxing it, you get the drive itself; I was very surprised to see how small NVME really is compared to SATA.Installation was relatively painless; make sure your MB has an m.2 slot that supports pcie 3.0 x4. I used windows disk management to format the drive and used samsung migration to move OS and all my data onto this new drive, then downloaded samsung magician for further utility. I recommend downloading the NVME driver from samsung's website as when you install the ... MoreFor $199 plus tax, I would say the 2TB Samsung 970 evo plus is really good for it's price. It's a better value than sata ssd's of the same value and price. It's a couple less cables to deal with which is nice.Arrived pretty quickly and box was in good condition, barely any scratches or scuffs. Unboxing it, you get the drive itself; I was very surprised to see how small NVME really is compared to SATA.Installation was relatively painless; make sure your MB has an m.2 slot that supports pcie 3.0 x4. I used windows disk management to format the drive and used samsung migration to move OS and all my data onto this new drive, then downloaded samsung magician for further utility. I recommend downloading the NVME driver from samsung's website as when you install the drive for the first time, it uses microsoft's nvme drivers. Downloading the samsung drivers provided a small boost to all stats as seen above.Drive runs relatively warm but not hot with my use. It idles around 45-52c and when gaming, it's between 55-65c without a heatsink on it.Gaming on it is a beast, load times are very fast and very little stuttering in games, especially compared to HDD's and Dramless ssd's. Downloads are very fast as well.One thing to note, it's been know samsung has made revisions of their 970 evo plus drives to have the elpis controller which is found on the 980 pro; that has slightly worse sustained writes when doing heavy workloads. My 2TB which has P/N MZVLB2T0HALB, has the old phoenix controller which is slightly better all round, drive was made in 2021 11 03 in Thailand.

Refurbished SSDs sound like a terrible idea right?

If you know anything about how NAND flash works, you’d understandably be hesitant to purchase a Refurbished (let’s be honest here) USED SSD because they wear out after being written/read enough times. In this case the warranty is done after 300 terabytes have been written to the 500GB disk. I decided to take a gamble on these because I planned on using a pair in my Synology NAS for cached data acceleration (even if the SSD failed, data wouldn’t be lost). I was pleasantly surprised when i encountered a drive that was written to very little, never overheated, and restarted less than a dozen times. (Using SMART to check the drive stats) By my math, the SSD has at least 99.7% of its life left. The cherry on top was my ability to register Samsung’s 5 year warranty to ... MoreIf you know anything about how NAND flash works, you’d understandably be hesitant to purchase a Refurbished (let’s be honest here) USED SSD because they wear out after being written/read enough times. In this case the warranty is done after 300 terabytes have been written to the 500GB disk. I decided to take a gamble on these because I planned on using a pair in my Synology NAS for cached data acceleration (even if the SSD failed, data wouldn’t be lost). I was pleasantly surprised when i encountered a drive that was written to very little, never overheated, and restarted less than a dozen times. (Using SMART to check the drive stats) By my math, the SSD has at least 99.7% of its life left. The cherry on top was my ability to register Samsung’s 5 year warranty to July 2027 (drive was purchased in January 2023). No clue where Best Buy is getting these from, but I’d buy these again. (For Best Buy, you’d probably move more of these units if you could guarantee that the drives have had less than a terabyte written in the description)

Samsung SSD 970 EOV Plus (1TB) (MZ-V7S1T0BW)

First, just a heads up that I purchased this product from Amazon, not Best Buy, but it is the exact same product, but Amazon keeps taking down my reviews for no reason, so here I am.Lets start at the prologue and Chapter 1 why i bought thisI purchased this 1TB drive to use as a USB 3 gen 2 external SSD, and i know in a couple months I wanted to change the enclosure to a USB 4 one in a few months time.USB 4s PCIE lanes are limited to 3000MBs read and write speed.So, I wanted something that was faster than this, but nothing faster was needed, so I only needed a PCIE 3 SSD.Seeing that this drive can write at 3300 and read at 3500, this was more than enough for the interface I use.Chapter 2 what storage is thisThere are different types of layers for storage ... MoreFirst, just a heads up that I purchased this product from Amazon, not Best Buy, but it is the exact same product, but Amazon keeps taking down my reviews for no reason, so here I am.Lets start at the prologue and Chapter 1 why i bought thisI purchased this 1TB drive to use as a USB 3 gen 2 external SSD, and i know in a couple months I wanted to change the enclosure to a USB 4 one in a few months time.USB 4s PCIE lanes are limited to 3000MBs read and write speed.So, I wanted something that was faster than this, but nothing faster was needed, so I only needed a PCIE 3 SSD.Seeing that this drive can write at 3300 and read at 3500, this was more than enough for the interface I use.Chapter 2 what storage is thisThere are different types of layers for storage layers,SLCMLCTLCQLCPLCS For Single 1 bitM For Multi 2 bitT For Triple 3 bitQ For Quad 4 bitP For Penta 5 bitMore layers means more storage density but slower speeds and less endurance.Samsung 970 Evo Plus is a TRIPLE LEVEL CELL drive, meaning that the drive is based on three bits per cell.However, all drives have a set of SLC blocks, or a formula that will write just one bit per cell until all the cells are full before writing to three bits per cell.Samsung 970 Evo Plus has between 4 to 78GB of single level cell SLC cache, before the drive slows down for TLC.Chapter 3 Testing for Thunderbolt and PCIE3 BoardsTesting reveals that the drive writes however many number of GB of SLC cache there is at 2950MBs, before the drive slows down to 1700MBs for tlc.The slowest 0.1 is at 1490MBs.For the 1TB and 2TB versions , this is BY FAR the FASTEST ENDURANCE DRIVE there is. NOTHING beats the Samsung 970 Evo Plus at TLC endurance, and anything that is faster than 970 at endurance is MLC, such as the 970 Pro. But that drive is 1.7 times the speed, and there is no way anyone is spending that much more for just 300MBs more.This means that using this for a USB 4 or Thunderbolt 3 4 SSD enclosure would give you the best endurance for the value.The Samsung X5, for reference, slows down to 1200MBs after 48GB of cache.Chapter 4 Testing for USB 3 gen 2 and 2x2Now for the USB 3 gen 2 enclosure.I used this with a Plugable USB 3 gen 2 NVMe enclosure, and seeing from a Samsung T7 that I have used before, and from testers on the internet, I was expecting about 1050MBs read and write via CrystalDiskMark 8.Slotting the drive in and plugging into my phone fir the first time, it said i have to format the drive. This was expected, since there is no format by default. I gave the drive exFAT format for use, since I use more than just Windows 10 computers, and the limit for file size is higher than the capacity of this drive.Testing for pure speed, I got a speed record of 1068MBs read and 1051MBs write, but the average is about 1050 and 1025.When I transferred a set of 45GB files in series, I was able to obtain a speed of 585MBs write and 825MBs read on average.The drive did not ever slow down, even after transferring 200GB worth of files, as expected, and i suspect it would never slow down here as the TLC speed is too fast for the interface which maxes out at 1250MBsHowever, when i copied files in parallel two or three lanes of data transfers, I was able to get a mammoth 970MBs write at any moment, and there were still no slowdowns.Compared to the Samsung T7, i was able to get 515MBs write and 680MBs read in series, and 775MBs write in parallel, but only for 22GB 42GB if you compare the 1TB version. After that, the T7 throttles to 250MBs, and this drive with USB enclosure would be 2.3X faster in series and 3.9X faster in parallel.This drive is 21 faster on reads, 13 faster in series, 25 faster in parallel, and faster in endurance. Yes, this drive has infinite endurance , just like the SanDisk Extreme Pro NVME USB 3.2 SSD.Chapter 5 the verdictSo, unless you have a PCIE 4 board, this is by far the best drive there is out there, except the 250 and 500GB versions continue to chapter 6 for warnings. Nothing beats this drive at endurance, and this drive is limited by the PCIE 3 interface, so if you dont have a PCIE 4 board, this is the fastest drive that money can buy.Not only is this from a Tier 1 brand, but it is also reasonably priced, and offers a 2TB model.Chapter 6 warnings1 Dont get the 250 or 500GB version, as the SLC cache is smaller, just 4 to 12GB for the 250GB version, and 4 to 22GB for the 500GB version.Also, the TLC speeds throttled speeds are ONLY 400MBS FOR 250GB and ONLY 900MBS FOR 500GB AFTER SLC CACHE. THESE DRIVES ARE USELESS BECAUSE OF THESE THROTTLED SPEEDS.2 Careful not to bend the SSD. It is very fragile, and could be damaged with the slightest pressure. Be careful when lowering the SSD into the screw so you dont bend the drive and break it as a result.3 Use exFAT if you intend to use this as an external SSD, otherwise you will not be able to use this drive outside of Windows PCs.End

Unbeatable price to performance ratio

I had always stayed away from refurbished storage components since I value my data but since this had non-moving parts, took a chance. And I am glad I did. On a B550 motherboard (supports PCI 4.0) this PCI 3.0 SSD doesn't stand out in terms of raw speed but for a $45 drive this kind of speed was unthinkable even before the chip shortage started. I am getting close to the rated read/write speed so no complaints there.The reason I docked a star (and possibly the reason why it might have been returned), is high temperature during general usage. Idle temperature around 60℃ and while writing a large file the temperature reached 75℃ (could still live with it) - during HeavyLoad benchmarking it reached 82℃, which was in the scary zone.The fix was easy - got an Icepc ... MoreI had always stayed away from refurbished storage components since I value my data but since this had non-moving parts, took a chance. And I am glad I did. On a B550 motherboard (supports PCI 4.0) this PCI 3.0 SSD doesn't stand out in terms of raw speed but for a $45 drive this kind of speed was unthinkable even before the chip shortage started. I am getting close to the rated read/write speed so no complaints there.The reason I docked a star (and possibly the reason why it might have been returned), is high temperature during general usage. Idle temperature around 60℃ and while writing a large file the temperature reached 75℃ (could still live with it) - during HeavyLoad benchmarking it reached 82℃, which was in the scary zone.The fix was easy - got an Icepc Copper Heatsink for $11 and now it stays around 60℃ during benchmarking. It did increase the cost to $56 though but I'd still recommend it to those who wouldn't push this drive too hard and the heatsink is not needed. Cost-wise it's pretty close to my Sabrent PCI 3.0 SSD after the heatsink purchase but it writes faster (Sabrent peaks at 2.4GB/s whereas this exceeds 3GB/s) so I'd recommend it to value conscious people looking for performance as well but if your NVME slot is behind the motherboard like mine and/or doesn't have much airflow, consider a heatsink.

Works enough to think there aren't any issues

Feels really scammy having things like ssds with only a 1 month return window since they are refurbished. Do you stand by your refurbishing or not??? Bought this back around Christmas time and it works just enough to think there aren't any issues with it. It shows up in windows, capacity is correct, you can write to it. But you are out of luck if you think it will be able to consistently locate that data or use it when you need it. I have had to move several games from this drive to my smaller windows install drive because some games are just unplayable if stored on this thing. Thought I was getting a deal, but this was a huge mistake. Don'\t buy refurbished from best buy until they are willing to stand buy the products for a long enough time that you can actually ... MoreFeels really scammy having things like ssds with only a 1 month return window since they are refurbished. Do you stand by your refurbishing or not??? Bought this back around Christmas time and it works just enough to think there aren't any issues with it. It shows up in windows, capacity is correct, you can write to it. But you are out of luck if you think it will be able to consistently locate that data or use it when you need it. I have had to move several games from this drive to my smaller windows install drive because some games are just unplayable if stored on this thing. Thought I was getting a deal, but this was a huge mistake. Don'\t buy refurbished from best buy until they are willing to stand buy the products for a long enough time that you can actually test if they work.