Review on SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus SSD 2TB - High-Speed M.2 NVMe Interface Internal Solid State Drive with V-NAND Technology (MZ-V7S2T0B/AM) by Andrew Arneson

I can only say wow! I returned the ADATA XPG SX8200 PRO 500GB for it and am very glad I did. Not all PCIE NVME drives are created equal and the benchmarks mean nothing as they are synthetic and the drives are built to perform the 'best' in benchmarks which can be a far cry from their actual performance. Firstly, the XPG SX8200 Pro website only gives you the best specs of the 1TB drive and it's almost impossible to find information on their website about the lower performance of the 512GB and 256GB drives (should a be a big indication of performance as they don't publish that easily or list minor disc specs on the main page). Second, the Crystal Diskmark benchmarks were pretty close, but when I actually tested copies of 9GB files to and from XPG, speeds were often below 600MB/s (even 150MB/s is stable). It performed better intermittently, but was regularly so uneven and far off benchmarks that I was either unlucky or just not as good as the specs in actual performance. Yes, it was about $30 cheaper than the new Samsung EVO PLUS 970, but in the end, the price difference was only overshadowed by actual performance. the same slot that ADATA had just been in, and not only did it beat the CrystalDisk Mark score, but actual file copies (using the same file as before) were consistently around 2000MB/s. Not as fast as the benchmark, but much better than ADATA and other PCIE NVME drives I've had the opportunity to test with. Also, these speeds stayed constant for the entire copy of the file while most other drives oscillated up and down. I know that even larger file copies will eventually slow down when the cache is exhausted, but that applies to all PCIe NVME drives that use TLC (or anything other than MLC flash). In addition, Samsung offers not only benchmark disk read/write performance when using TurboBoost with cache, but also the performance you can expect when the cache is running low. No other manufacturer shows this and shows Samsung's confidence in its drives. I was so impressed by this drive that I immediately ordered another one. To be honest, I don't think other "similar" drives are even remotely capable (the WD N750 may be the closest, but it's still not on par with this drive in REAL file copy performance). If you're planning on saving a few bucks for a cheaper PCIe NVME drive, I highly recommend making your own copies of large files and seeing if your "cheaper" drive actually works the way it's on the based on surface performance tests. . Otherwise, save yourself the frustration and just get the Samsung EVO PLUS to get started and you won't regret it.