Intel currently has three main flavors of Optane on the market: small accelerator modules meant to act as a cache for spinning disks, medium sized drives meant to store your OS and a few select programs, and full sized drives for your huge Steam library or other data intensive workloads. So Intel's take here is to offer storage that is faster than NAND flash with latencies closer to RAM, larger capacity than RAM but pricing closer to an SSD, and significantly higher endurance than traditional SSDs. Secondary storage, like an SSD or HDD, is great for storing large amounts of information that don't need to be accessed as frequently. Primary memory like RAM is great at storing small bits of data that need to be accessed very quickly, but it is expensive and doesn't have a large capacity. Optane works in a fundamentally different way from other types of storage we seen before. Intel boasts of Optane as one of the biggest breakthroughs in computer storage history. Next on the list is Intel's Optane storage technology which they launched last year.
The higher priced 970 Pro with its 2-bit MLC flash is rated for 4x write endurance but given the Evo's impecable track record and ample terabytes written rating (TBW), to the average user those figures won't matter much. Samsung's new strategy thus becomes clearer, as the more popular Evo line is now taking over the Pro as the main offering for most consumers. On paper, the two drives, comparing across the same storage capacity, have very similar read and write speeds. The 970 Pro uses 2-bit MLC flash, while the 970 Evo uses 3-bit MLC flash in a TLC configuration which is cheaper to manufacture. The key difference between the two drives is the type of internal memory they use. Samsung advertises the two drives as having performance similar to each other. The 970 Evo is available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB variants with prices ranging from $107 for the 250GB version up to $800 for the 2TB variant.įor testing today, we have the 1TB version of the 970 Pro and the 500GB version of the 970 Evo. The 970 Pro is available in 500GB and 1TB versions at a price of $230 and $570, respectively. Samsung claims that stacking the cells also improves longevity and power efficiency. Compared to traditional NAND storage in which the cells are laid out flat on the PCB, V-NAND uses a vertical arrangement.
Both of these SSDs use Samsung's 3D V-NAND technology to achieve high density at an affordable cost.
They represent the successors to the highly successful 960 Pro and 960 Evo line from late 2016. Having commanded many of our top SSD lists for the past few years, the first models in our roundup are Samsung's 970 Pro and 970 Evo SSD.
Some systems and drives may be backwards compatible which will allow you to run in a legacy SATA mode over M.2, but you'll want to check your manual before purchasing. You'll need a relatively new chipset to support this technology since older motherboards do not have M.2 ports. Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe, is now the standard for high speed storage drives. But for the most part products reviewed today will be anywhere from 2 to 3 times faster in raw throughput figures. Until just a few years ago we rejoiced for getting those kind of speeds.
To draw a straightforward comparison: Samsung's most popular SATA SSD is the SSD 860 Pro (~$120 for 500GB) and that's possibly as fast as a SATA drive will go. This offers higher throughput, lower latency, and more room for scaling. A previous generation NVMe SSD from Intel has also been thrown in for comparison.Īs the SATA link became a bottleneck for the advancing speeds of SSDs, manufacturers started connecting them directly through the PCI Express bus. We're taking a look at top players Samsung's 970 Pro and 970 Evo, Intel's Optane M.2 modules and Intel's Optane PCIe card and WD's Black SSD. Which products are the best for certain workloads, what technologies are out there, and what should you choose for your next build. Today we'll be taking a look at the latter segment, comprised exclusively of NVMe solid storage.
There's a lot of marketing fluff and artificial numbers thrown around, though ultimately it's a great time to upgrade your storage considering ever-lower prices and two distinct segments that go from fast and relatively affordable storage to extremely fast and more costly solutions. Each product claims to be the fastest with advanced technologies that leave the competition in the dust. The SSD market can seem overwhelming at first glance.