Samsung’s 970 Pro 512GB PCIe SSD is £110 of its retail price.
Once upon a time, all SSDs were expensive. Then it was just high performance models. Today? You can get one of the finest NAND-based SSDs around, the Samsung 970 Pro 512GB M.2, for well under £150. That’s an incredible deal compared to when it first launched.
- The Samsung 970 Pro 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD is available now from amazon.co.uk for £139
OK, £140 for the Samsung 970 Pro in 512GB spec isn’t exactly pocket change. But around a year ago when the 970 Pro was launched, it was listed at £249 and typically sold for about £220. That’s a big saving and one hell of a deal on what remains one of the quickest NAND SSDs on the market and the cheapest yet that we’ve seen. Samsung’s dominance in the realm of NAND flash has been well documented over the years, with the performance usually following the premium, so seeing the 970 Pro at such a low price, only fills us with joy.
Highlights include the M.2 form factor and with it, a quad-lane PCI Express interface for maximum SSD throughput. Net result? Multiple gigabytes of sequential performance for both reads and writes. It wasn’t all that long ago that the Samsung 970 Pro 512GB’s 3.5GB/s read and 2.3GB/s write performance was the stuff of system memory rather than a hard disk. Impressive.
Of course, although sequential speeds do make for some good marketing material, arguably the more important real-world daily PC performance metric is the short-queue random access figure. Thanks to its advanced Phoenix controller chipset, the Samsung 970 Pro is about as good as flash-based SSDs get there, too. Plus, it’s all backed up by a write endurance rating of 600TB and a five-year warranty. So, spending a little extra on this deal should make for a sound long-term investment.
Specifications
| Capacity | 512GB |
| Interface | PCIe 3.0 x4 |
| Control Protocol | NVMe |
| Controller | Samsung Phoenix |
| NAND Type | 64-layer 3D MLC |
| Sequential Read / Write | 3,500 / 2,300 MB/s |
| Read / Write IOPS | 500 / 500 K |
| Warranty | 5 Years |
Premium M.2 SSD performance
Of course you can find SSDs that certainly come cheaper than the Samsung 970 Pro. But few come faster. At least they don’t when is comes to NAND flash drives. Admittedly, Intel’s 3D Xpoint-based Optane drives are much faster still by some metrics. But they’re also megabucks.
At £140 for a 512GB model, you’re getting a crazy quick flash drive that’s big enough for a proper operating system install, plus a lot of apps, including your favourite games. If you’re looking for a long term investment rather than a budget drive to tide you over, the Samsung 970 Pro at this all-time low price comes highly recommended.
