Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1 TB PCIe NVMe M.2 Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (MMZ-V7S1T0BW )

Product Information

Though it can't quite match the gaming prowess of some of the latest generation of PCIe 4.0 speedsters, the 990 Pro with Heatsink still offers respectable gaming performance while being a thoroughbred workhorse for creative tasks. It's an appealing choice and a worthy upgrade from the 980 Pro.

Nowadays, though, many lean, premium laptops can make use of PCI Express-bus M.2 SSDs. (Just about all new desktop motherboards with M.2 slots also support PCI Express M.2 SSDs, too.) With these, you may see a substantive increase in performance in benchmark testing, but in most real-world usage, they'll just feel like a fast, premium SATA SSD. All of this leaves the minor matter of how this drive actually performs. When it comes to peak sequential throughput, the Platinum P41 is basically as fast as anything else out there, bar a few rounding errors. OK, the Samsung 990 Pro is a bit faster at 7,462MB/s for reads to the P41's 7,375MB/s. But, honestly, it's inconsequential. The same goes for writes, where almost all the top drives will do just under 6.9GB/s.Smaller-capacity 32GB and 64GB M.2 SSDs are also available for use in embedded applications or for SSD caching, but these are of marginal interest to upgraders or PC builders. Pricing on these drives ranges anywhere from 10 to 75 cents per gigabyte, and the biggest factor affecting price is the bus type of the drive. EXCERIA PLUS G2 SSD / EXCERIA PLUS SSD / EXCERIA SSD: Sequential speeds are measured with CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64, Q=32, T=1. Well, it's got it all if the context is PCIe 4.0 drives. There is a new generation of PCIe 5.0 drives but they're a bit over the top for most gamers right now. PCIe Gen 4 is not only where it's at, it's probably also the limit of your PC or laptop's capabilities. Know which bus you're on. In a laptop-upgrade scenario, you're almost certainly swapping out one M.2 drive for another, with the intent of gaining capacity. Make sure you know the specifications of the drive coming out of your system—and whether it's reliant on the SATA or PCI Express bus—so you can install the same, presumably roomier kind going in.

It's worth noting that this drive can get hot when pushed, just like the SN850. It hit 76°C after a long day of testing, but without direct cooling on it, not even a heatsink. It should be fine in most systems, especially if your motherboard does come with some cooling solution. Even in mSATA's heyday, though, a replacement was in the works. During development, it was known as NGFF, for "Next-Generation Form Factor." As it took shape, though, it took on its current, final name: M.2. The drives would be smaller, potentially more capacious, and, most important, not necessarily reliant on SATA. That's not a bad thing. Especially in the case of laptops, an older machine might support only M.2 SATA-bus SSDs, and that will be the boundary of your upgrade path...end of story. As a result, the only reasons you'd upgrade the drive, in that situation, would be to get more capacity, or if the old one failed. The NVMe, or Non-Volatile Memory Express interface, has been designed specifically with solid state drives in mind. In contrast, SATA, the previous interface in charge, was built to cater to most HDDs. The thought is, at the time, that no storage would ever need to exceed its lofty max bandwidth. To the surprise of a few, new storage mediums such as solid state absolutely blaze past SATA's max bandwidth, and so a new protocol in NVMe was born.

The main way it achieves this is by being a DRAM-less SSD drive. This saves a big chunk of the manufacturer's bill of materials, and thanks to advances in the latest controllers, it can be surprising how little impact this has on performance. Such drives are slower, don't get me wrong, but this new SN770 still quotes read and writes of 5,150MB/s and 4,900MB/s, respectively. Not bad. Definition of capacity: KIOXIA defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 2 Early examples of the latest generation of M.2 drives, using the PCI Express 5.0 bus, also come in the Type-2280 format, but it's expected that some PCIe 5.0 slots on new motherboards will be built to support the larger Type-25110 format (25mm by 110mm), so we may well see PCIe 5.0 SSDs with these dimensions as well. PCIe 5 drives are capable of tremendous throughput speeds (in excess of 10,000MBps) that should generate abundant heat, and the SSDs we have seen so far come with substantial built-in heatsinks.