Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB NVMe Linux SSD Benchmarks

Announced at the end of January was the Samsung 970 EVO Plus as the first consumer-grade solid-state drive with 96-layer 3D NAND memory. The Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSDs are now shipping and in this review are the first Linux benchmarks of these new SSDs in the form of the Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB MZ-V7S500B/AM compared to several other SSDs on Linux.

The Samsung 970 EVO Plus uses the same Phoenix controller as in their existing SSDs but the big upgrade with the EVO Plus is the shift to the 96-layer 3D NAND memory. Available now through Internet retailers are the 250GB / 500GB / 1TB versions of the 970 EVO Plus at a new low of just $130 USD for the 500GB model or $250 USD for the 1TB version. A 2GB model is expected to ship this spring.

The Samsung 970 EVO Plus drives are backed by Samsung with a five-year warranty and the 500GB model is rated for a 300TB write endurance. The 500GB model supports sequential reads up to 3,500MB/s, sequential writes up to 3,200MB/s, random 4K reads up to 480K IOPS, and random writes up to 550K IOPS.

To little surprise, the Samsung 970 EVO Plus has been working well under Linux. As Samsung doesn't send us out drives for Linux testing, this 970 EVO Plus testing had to wait until these new lower-cost consumer NVMe SSDs were available, which can now be found from major retailers including NewEgg.com. The other drives tested included the:

- Samsung 850 PRO 256GB SATA 3.0 SSD
- Samsung 970 EVO 250GB
- Samsung 970 EVO 500GB
- Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB
- Samsung 970 PRO 512GB
- Intel 600p NVMe SSD
- Intel Optane 900p 280GB
- Intel DC P3600 800GB

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a variety of benchmarks were conducted from the Ubuntu 18.10 installation with the Linux 5.0 kernel. All of these solid-state drives were benchmarked while using clean EXT4 file-systems on each device.