Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB SSD Review

Game Load Time

The lower random read performance pushes the 500GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus down the Game Load Time performance chart. It takes nearly 1 second longer to load the Final Fantasy: Stormblood levels compared to the best on the chart today. That one second split contains six strong SSDs.

PCMark 8 Total Storage Bandwidth

Moving to a wider range of applications, the 500GB EVO Plus fairs much better thanks to higher sequential performance. The EVO Plus still trails the MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro and ADATA SX8200 Pro in the same 512GB capacity class.

PCMark 8 Extended Storage Test

The performance looks much different under heavy workloads and right after a healthy dose of data writes. Samsung usually has superior background and predictive garbage collection to keep performance high even under stressful workloads. The new 970 EVO Plus improves on the original 970 EVO and even gets very close to the performance on tap from the 970 Pro (not in the charts today but you can see it in the 1TB EVO Plus review).

SYSmark 2014 SE System Responsiveness and Power Tests

The Responsiveness Test comes from BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 SE suite. The test measures overall system responsiveness (latency) and presents it as a weighted score. The base score is 1,000, and it comes from an OEM variant of the Samsung 850 EVO.

The 970 EVO Plus performs well in the test that focuses on office workloads.

Notebook Battery Life

The 500GB EVO Plus scored just 308 minutes in our Lenovo Y700-17 gaming notebook in the BAPCo MobileMark test. The time is ten minutes less than the previous generation EVO and at the bottom of the list for the drives tested.