Samsung 970 EVO Plus MZ-V7S500BW | Internal NVMe M.2 SSD, 500 GB, Up to 3,500 MB/s Sequential Read

Great drive which performs very well in benchmarks. Personally I use this drive for multiple virtual machines where it seems to be more responsive when booting, installing or performing disk heavy I/O. I could manage just fine on a SATA model, but this NVMe causes the VMs to feel more snappy and responsive in this scenario. Outside of this specific workload, the drive feels similar to my SATA SSDs since my other tasks are not usually limited by storage performance. After all, SATA solid state drives are already significantly faster and have very low latency compared to spinning rust (hard drives). Benchmarks were ran on my Ryzen 2700X system with an Asus Crosshair X470 motherboard. Due to being so compact and fast, these drives can get hot. Under heavy sequential write workloads these drives can get toasty and potentially throttle. Running CrystalDiskMark with default settings saw a peak temperature of 64C (22C ambient, installed in desktop but with no active airflow). I suspect that in a restrictive environment, such as a laptop, that throttling could possibly be common in heavy workloads. Packaging is good. Small cardboard box with a plastic shell protecting the SSD drive. It did not come with a screw to install the drive though as these are usually included with your motherboard. Very easy to install with no cables needed. Samsung magician software is also decent and easy to use with a clean design. I have tried a range of tools from other manufacturers but the Samsung software is a clear winner. It isn’t necessary, but it allows you to benchmark the drive, set overprovisioning, secure erase and more. Also make sure to install the Samsung NVMe driver from their website for optimal performance. As for Amazon, I have a mixed experience. The first drive I ordered was stolen (broken security seal and drive missing) but they quickly arranged a replacement without any hassle. The product itself though is fantastic.

What can I tell you? I've given it 5 stars because, so far, the whole operation of purchase, delivery, installation, installation of OS, and use, has been as smooth as silk. I decide to build a new desktop DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to run Ableton Live 10. And with the intention of connecting multiple audio and MIDI devices. I bought this Intel Mini PC from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07KPMWTQS/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 . It's bare bones so needed a hard drive, memory, operating system and all the peripherals. I chose an M.2 type SSD after reading up on the internet about keeping down the heat generation and about operating speed. I chose this RAM for the same reason: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01BNJL8I4/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1. For installation, I followed the instructions supplied by Intel (on the web). It was simple enough, and quickly done. But I did take the precaution of wearing an anti- static wrist band and earthing myself to the Mini PC chassis. Installing the OS on the drive was also just a case of following the bouncing ball. This OS was a great price at the time and it came supplied with Windows 10 on a USB key: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0111YEG44/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 But a much cheaper OEM version would do just as well. The PC boots up and Ableton opens up, all incredibly quickly. Installing any new USB device seems to happen in seconds. So I'd say the drive is working well with the PC and the RAM. Before I jacked up the permanent speed of the processor to around 4.45 Ghz from the standard 2.7Ghz, I don't think the PC fan operated at all, so I'd say, it's really not generating that much heat. So it's been one of those delightful (but sadly rare) experiences, when having chosen the product, then fitting it and using it just went very smoothly. I only have one pic, which shows the Mini PC itself... that measures a little over 10x10x5 cms and provides plenty of room for this M.2 SSD - I even have a Sandisk 2.5" SSD drive in there to hold my library files and it's certainly not "crowding" the Samsung.

Great item. Fast delivery. Well packaged. Highly recommended. 100% good Fast drive very reliable

Got it for quite few years. Works fine. 60TB load on 500GB drive. Quite impressive. 98% life as reported by drive. Real or not. Time will tell. Full speeds as advertised. However. On the RIGHT drivers. Windows 7 heavily affected by driver quality/ source. Full speed constant 3000+ reads. Writes varies around NOT CONSANT 2000. HOWEVER. Drive's real (write) speeds are ONLY present, when it is been written at least ONCE, and with capacity reached. And overheating. No cooling - forget about any speeds. Reminder. Cooling applies to physical DRIVER chip of the drive, NOT the NVME modules. Driver on the drive wants cool. NVME wants the hot in operation. Hot driver chip will bring down drive to zero stop. ZERO. For several seconds/ minutes. This should be clear in every description. So. Testing must be done on ALL drive, written at least once, and with majority of capacity used. Love - as usually - when people do 0.01% drive size test, as any indication. And on fresh drive. Many of the drives CHEAT. Means. First portion of drive, which is tested is ultra fast, either physically or buffer. Mostly sd cards/ usb drives/ etc. But. Got Crucial nvme first, and it does exactly the same. 10GB ultra fast, then drops down to 1000 for the REST of the drive. As oppose most SSDs will perform 100% all drive day and out. So. Once you REALLY use the drive. Means written, not once, but several times, and used more capacity, drives starts to show REAL LIFE speeds. If you delete a file. Windows MUST physically delete a lot of drive. Not just entry in File allocation table. It will not do it in an instant, but on buffer. Try to switch off computer after deleting/ copying big files, and you wait for several minutes. Try to do massive files deletion, beyond treshold and windows has to do it here and now. For ages. Normally you won't notice, because it's all in background. On long switch on systems, absolutely not noticable. Try to copy serious data on maxed out drive, and you are for a big surprise on real speeds. Because majority of people get massive drives, to what they use, they won't notice. Paying several times for what they use. On Windows 7, due drivers and structure, massive bottle necks on writes. It's much more complicated than just 'test' or 'use', or capacity, or deletion. There is massive bottle necks on pcie resource allocation. If you have fast graphic card in use, your nvme drive is heavily bottlenecked. Only very expensive motherboards have this semi sorted. For majority of people, none of this would matter, they won't notice. But. For those who REALLY get NVMEs for the purpose, it does. Ah yes. Final word for all that lovely misinformation about defraging ssd/ nvme. It does indeed decrease drive's life, by zero point nothing. It does however increase the performance. For regular person, by zero point nothing. For serious use, servers, high capacity data storing, professional high speeds copying, for which all these drives are meant to exist, it does completely. Drives ssd/ nvmes have 'lost capacity', not shown on the tag, exactly for the purpose of internal 'defrag', on idle mode. Use the drive heavy in short bursts and speeds are dropping down. To zero. As drive has to operate on 'loss of power mode'. So. Hard lesson. With power loss or forced resets. Lots of data 'lost', because drive couldn't write it physically on time. As it takes a long while to zero data blocks, and then write tons of data from buffer. So. Defrag of ssds/ nvmes. You can defrag your drive as much as you please. And it will be zero point nothing of drive use. Windows uses drive endlessly and massively and constantly. Reads are not hurting. Writes are where drive's life is. And any windows writes trillions of times. I'm light user of pc. And my 500gb drive has 60'000gb of reads and writes (half half). Majority of which is Windows. Not me. So. If you are doing defrag, whenever you please, you will allocate for zero point nothing of drive's use. 99.9% of drives killing is done by windows. And hm.... Afer quite few years of using drive, and 60'000gb it's still 98% of life, as reported by drive. Real or not. Time will tell. Means you can use drive for 20 years before it will be dead. Majority of people will change drive a lot earlier than that (hdd 3-6 years, ssd 5 years at best, nvme first generation probably few years). In other words, defrag has completely no meaning to drive's life. Zero. It does have serious meaning to performance for serious - designed for - use. And for regular user. Exactly the bottleneck of capacity used and non defraged system, where drive will bottleneck in zeroing data and writing new one. Reading my own words, only high level IT people will understand. Thou - every user is affected, but is not aware. When copied tons of data, deleted tons of data, etc, thinking it's done, when bar is 100%. Reality, windows can still clear the data, hours after instruction, same with copying. Only exception is read only data in big files. Like movies. But then. How many users have data stored in adequate partitions. Read/ write/ rare/ often/ movies/ system/ etc.

Ordered this 970EVO 500GB as my first M.2 PCI-E SSD and I am really impressed with how fast it is. I use it for my installation of DCS World 2.5 Beta and the loading times are hugely faster than my Kingston SSD. For reference, my Rig consists of water cooled Intel i7 5820K, 32GB Hyper X Predator DDR4 RAM and GTX 1080Ti GPU powered by a Corsair CS750M PSU. Fitting it to my ASUS Rampage Extreme V board was easy and the motherboard already had a screw ready and waiting for me to adjust. Well done ASUS :) The SSD is as small as a stick of chewing gum, perhaps smaller and I am amazed how small these things are getting compared to the traditional HDD. Once installed I went into BIOS to ensure that it was registering and voila there it was without any tweaking of the BIOS. Once Windows 10 64Bit had booted I was disappointed to see that the drive was not showing. A wee bit of research showed that you have to initialise the drive as you would any other hard drive (rusty old me lol). Once this is done through Disk management then the SSD shows. You just then need to give it a partition, again using windows and then the drive is good to go for whatever you need it to do. I found the free to use software EaseUS Todo a good option if you want to clone an entire drive or just the system files. The Samsung website also has a good bit of free software called Magician which will monitor your M.2 SSD. In summary I cannot fault this little stick of slick magic. I just wish I had more M.2 SSD slots on my motherboard! Buy it, you will not be disappointed. For £163 at the time of purchase this M.2 will only get cheaper as the market recovers from a shortage and price hike. Update edit: I also have just attached a nice little mini heatsink which has reduced temps considerably. I recommend adding a heatsink like the one I got (cost £8.99). Aqua Computer Kryom. 2 Passive Cooler for M.2 2280 SSD

My SSHD in my Tower PC started to show signs it was going to fail so I decided to completely rebuild with new components - Motherboard, SSD, CPU, RAM and fans. The only thing I have kept are my graphics and sound cards. With a new CPU, RAM and this M.2 Solid State Drive I have lightning fast speeds. So fast that my eyes and brain can't keep up with the page transitions. (I did tweak the page filing system to allow more access for the RAM - you can double RAM size, see Youtube. The downside is you lose some space on the SSD, but I only use mine to run the PC with Installed programs). I have several professional music programs which took a good long while to load and would often crash. Not anymore! They load within 2-3 seconds and are stable. Overall, I think SSD's with non moving parts are definitely the way forward and Samsung are a trustworthy and reliable brand. If M.2 is new to you don't be afraid. This is my first build with this type of storage and it literally is Plug and Play, just like fitting a new HDD. Just be aware of the different socket type on the motherboard. Mine is M-type 2280. Also my mobo won't allow SATA sockets 5 & 6 to be used if M.2 is installed. This is fine for me as I only need 1-4 so check your manual. I am very happy - lightning fast speeds and also space saving. Some people have said it can run very hot but no problems for me, my new CPU temps are keeping me alert!!

Keep reading you may save money or frustration: This M.2 drive comes in fancy packaging which doesn't include a fitting screw... If you have a "stock" PC like HP or Dell chances are you won't have one and will have to get it from somewhere... M.2 screws aren't generic size so you can't just swap one from somewhere else. Luckily I had one in my motherboard box. After installation, you need to partition it (search internet eg. Partition new drive in Win10). You don't need to partition if you're installing a fresh copy of Windows on it - it's going to do it for you. After this drive will benefit from Samsung Magician which is a free software from internet, it manages your drive, keeping it healthy. You may also come across an issue whereby your second or third SSD/HDD doesn't show up in Windows any more. Solution - move data cables around connecting them to different sockets. My Magician was showing "drive not genuine" refusing to set it up. Solution - update software, my app was one year old and drive is new technology. Testing - this drive on paper is massively faster then generic SSD and significantly faster then older 860 M.2 drive. Can I see a difference in gaming - no. Can I see a difference in load speeds, data write/read - no. Does it benefit me over other cheaper drives - no. Should I have bought a cheaper M.2 with more capacity - yes. I honestly made a mistake by investing in this M.2, should have gone for a cheaper bigger 1GB drive for a similar price - for gaming and office use. Hopefully this will save you some money or get you a bigger drive for similar price! 4 stars as too expensive in comparison to other products. 5 stars if you don't care about value for money or have specialist interest in extra speeds (comment if image/video processing or 3d work show you VISIBLY better processing rates over slower 860 drive or other M.2 drives)

I purchased the Samsung 970 PRO 512 GB NVMe for my PC to use as the OS (Windows 10 x64) and applications drive. This drive is incredibly quick and Windows now boots up to the desktop before the animated boot logo even appears - that's how quick it is! Compared to a mechanical hard disk the difference in performance is astronomical and you will never look back. It's also considerably faster than a SATA SSD drive. Compared to another NVMe disk you may struggle to see much difference in everyday use unless you are using the disk very heavily such as for sustained data transfers and high random IO. I was a little disappointed when I benchmarked the disk on my PC because the numbers came back lower than Samsung's advertised speeds - the speeds are still insane though so I am definitely not complaining. However, it appears that other users have managed to get close to the maximum speeds of the disk without issue. I'm currently running an ASUS X299 board and apparently I'm not alone with users getting less than advertised speeds with their X299 boards. This looks like a firmware issue with my motherboard so hopefully this will get fixed by ASUS. The 970 Pro is Samsung's flagship NVMe disk and is a lot more expensive than the 970 EVO, as is always the way. If you have done any research into comparing the two you will see that the performance between them is very similar. The 970 Pro does use a different type of NAND which doubles the endurance rating (TeraBytes Written) of the drive but other than that I don't think most users will be able to tell the difference between them in every day use. Pros: - Incredibly fast - 5 year warranty - Works with Samsung Magician (the OEM drives don't) - High TBW endurance rating Neutral - Requires a NVMe slot which older systems don't have (you can purchase a PCI Express adapter for the majority of PCs though). Cons - Expensive - Negligible differences in performance when compared to the 970 EVO (and similar performing drives from other manufacturers)