Samsung today introduced the Samsung 970 EVO Plus, the newest enhancement in its Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD portfolio.

By integrating the company’s most advanced V-NAND chips (96-layer 3D NAND) with optimized firmware and Samsung's Phoenix controller , the 970 EVO Plus achieves performance improvements - up to 53 percent in random write speed for 250GB version - as well as increased power efficiency over its predecessor, the 970 EVO. The new drive delivers sequential read and write speeds of up to 3,500 megabytes per second (MB/s) and up to 3,300 MB/s, respectively, while random speeds come in at up to 620,000 IOPS for read and up to 560,000 IOPS for write operations.

The new generation of 3D NAND upgrades the interface between the controller and NAND to Toggle-mode DDR 4.0, increasing the interface speed from 800Mbps to 1400Mbps while reducing the voltage from 1.8V to 1.2V. This gives Samsung the lead for another generation, as 96L NAND from Intel, Micron and SK Hynix will only support up to a 1200Mbps interface, and Toshiba/SanDisk 96L NAND is only at 800Mbps.

Within each NAND flash die, Samsung has also made improvements to read and program latency, now down to about 50µs and 500µs respectively, improving by about 30%.

The 970 EVO Plus comes in a compact M.2 form factor using the PCIe Gen3 x4 interface found in most modern computers. The 970 EVO Plus also offers a five-year limited warranty or up to 1,200 terabytes written.

The 970 EVO Plus's write performance varies based on how much data lands in the TurboWrite cache, which is a small section of faster SLC-programmed flash that's used to boost performance. Samsung's EVO Plus has both a default TurboWrite cache capacity, which doesn't change regardless of conditions, and an Intelligent TurboWrite region that varies in size depending on the model and the amount of free space on the drive.

Given the limited size of the TurboWrite cache, some large file transfers and workloads will land in the slower TLC flash. Even with the new NAND interface operating 40 percent faster than it did with V4 V-NAND, direct-to-TLC writes are still slower than the Intelligent TurboWrite region. But Samsung also improved the write performance of the TLC flash, which helps reduce the impact in those conditions. Samsung provides performance specifications for both TurboWrite and "after TurboWrite" performance, as listed in the chart below.

The 970 EVO Plus comes in a variety of capacity options; the 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacity versions are now available for purchase worldwide, and the 2TB capacity will become available in April. Manufacturer’s suggested retail prices are $89.99 (250GB, 36¢/GB), $129.99 (500GB, 26¢/GB) and $249.99 (1TB, 25¢/GB).