Samsung SSD 970 PRO NVMe 512GB 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 PRO 512GB:

ATTO – Samsung SSD 960 PRO 512GB:

Benchmark Results: ATTO showed the Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe drive reaching speeds of up to 3581 MB/s read and 2342 MB/s write in the standard overlapped I/O benchmark. This drive is rated at up to 3500 MB/s max sequential read and 2300 MB/s max sequential write, so we were easily able to hit the drives rated speeds on out Intel Z370 test platform.

Benchmark Results: Compared to some other SATA III and PCIe NVMe SSDs, the Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB drive tops the performance charts with its 3500 MB/s read speeds that it reached by the 64KB block size.

Benchmark Results: The new WD Black 3D NVMe drive tops the charts here with around 2850 MB/s write speeds, but the Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB drive wasn’t too far behind with 2300 MB/s writes. If Samsung would have sampled the faster 970 PRO 1TB drive with 2700 MB/s write speeds it would be a bit closer up top.

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 PRO 512GB:

CystalDiskmark – Samsung SSD 960 PRO 512GB:

Benchmark Results: The Samsung SSD 970 PRO drive topped out at 3561 MB/s read and 2331 MB/s write in the standard sequential write test that is done at QD32. Random 4K QD1 performance was 64.69 MB/s read and 199 MB/s write. Those 4K random performance numbers improved up to 406 MB/s read and 353 MB/s write at a queue depth of 32.Right off the bat we notice nearly 17% higher peak sequential write speeds on the Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB over the Samsung SSD 970 PRO. The Sequential read speed is about the same, but take a look at the 4K Random read speed as they are nearly 17% higher as well.

Let’s look at some other benchmarks!