Samsung SSD 970 EVO NVMe 1TB SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

ATTO & CrystalDiskMark

ATTO v3.05

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5KB through 64MB transfer sizes with the total length being 256MB.

ATTO – Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB:

Benchmark Results: ATTO showed the Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe drive reaching speeds of up to 3290 MB/s read and 2519 MB/s write in the standard overlapped I/O benchmark. This drive is rated at up to 3400 MB/s max sequential read and 2500 MB/s max sequential write, so we just missed the rated read speed by over 100 MB/s on this platform.

Benchmark Results: Compared to some other drives the sequential read speeds of the Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB drive were in the middle of the pack with 6-7 drives offering comparable performance.

Benchmark Results: With regards to sequential write speeds the Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB drive stands out from the pack with the second highest scores on the larger block sizes with only the WD Black 3D NVMe drive beating it.

CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0 x64

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) and shows the highest score of five runs.

CystalDiskmark – Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB:

Benchmark Results: The Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB drive topped out at 3567 MB/s read and 2501 MB/s write in the standard sequential write test that is done at QD32. This beats the drives rated speed of 3,400 MB/s read and 2,500 MB/s write! Random 4K QD1 performance was 50.37 MB/s read and 184.1 MB/s write. Those 4K random performance numbers improved up to 400 MB/s read and 353 MB/s write at a queue depth of 32. Manually running the sequential performance test at Q1T1 showed performance of 2217 MB/s read and 2106 MB/s write. Very solid scores for an EVO series drive with the new Samsung V-NAND 3bit MLC and Samsung Phoenix Controller.

Let’s look at some other benchmarks!