Confused on new SSD from Samsung

Hey guys,

I'm looking into adding a second SSD to my Gigabyte Aero 15, and have decided the put a Samsung 970 Evo Plus in the gen 3 slot, and a 980 Pro in the gen 4 slot. However, when looking at the 970 Evo Plus, there are two different model numbers. I cannot tell the difference.

MZ-V7S2T0BW vs MZ-V7S2T0B/AM. They are both listed as 970 Evo Plus, the /AM model currently $237 on Amazon for a 2tb model, and the BW listed for $359 for a 2tb model. A 1tb BW model goes for $239.

What does the /AM mean?

Are the Samsung drives good choices, or should I look at a WD Black or a Seagate Firecuda? Or perhaps a Hynix Gold?



90D

 

In regards to the /AM or not. It might just be a reseller marking it up for some reason.

For a 2TB NVME though most options should be fine with a 5 year warranty and high TBW rating. Recently though OEM's have been swapping controllers and RAM on them to cut costs and well performance decreases as well. Amazon is a safe bet w/ free returns if it doesn't perform well in testing once you get it.

 

Whats the best way to test the drive? I'm really liking the stats on the hynix gold, but I'm not seeing a gen 4 pcie option from them. I'd like to not mix and match if possible. Sabrent Rocket also seems to get good reviews as well, and comes with free acronis so I can clone my current drive.

Oh, and as for the bw/am thing, its actually listed on the pdf spec sheet for the drives on the Samsung website, with no mention of any differences. So I'm very confused as to the price differences. I tried to attach a screenshot but I'm on mobile and can't figure out how to get it on here.

90D

 

You can clone any drive / OS using clonezilla on a USB boot drive.

As for the drives themselves testing them is fairly easy to do if you have 2 M2 slots just bulk copy a bunch of data and if it starts high and then drops suddenly in the middle then it's time to try a different ones.

I have dual drives in my laptop but, both have the same controller Phison E12. They're a BPX Pro and a NY CS3030. Both hit over 1GB in transfers but, the PNY hits a higher 1.5GB/s in copies. The only time I got caught up int he chips was when playing around with GPU's and mining. In that instance the chips make a big difference in how you configure the cards to perform better for calculations / hashes. Drives on the other hand you want to be cool when idle and not too hot when they're being pushed with bulk transfers.

In reality any NVME version is fine for most activities unless you get turned on by break neck speeds. The only real "need" for these things is saving time when copying large data. Otherwise they're mostly idle when doing most anything on your machine. If you're doing drive intensive calculations then it might make more sense to target Gen 4/5 drives but, paying the premium if you're not then it doesn't make much sense.

Boot time ~10 seconds for Windows is mostly slow because well, it's windows. Even in an enclosures these drives typically top out at 800MB/s on USB-C gen 2. There are other options that move faster like TB3 / USB4 but, the ports aren't widely available in most most machines. Now, when it comes to networking that's a different story as I have a 5gps USBC adapter for copying things faster on the network and it was ~$75 vs a 10gbps TB3 adapter running around $200-$300 for the licensing for TB.

Anyway... you can grab apps for synthetic testing but, what good is that in the real world use of copying files?

 

My main use for this new laptop is for photo editing with programs like On1 Photo Raw, Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. The pictures all either come from my Canon 90D which is a near 33 megapixel camera and I shoot in both RAW and JPEG formats. It will also do 4k video at 30fps but I rarely take videos. So, most of the time when I dump my memory card over to sift through my files it is around a 70-80gb transfer. So I like the idea of faster read/write speeds, but I'm a bit inhibited by the internal SD card reader which generally tops out around 300mb/s. Ive yet to try my external USB 3.0 card reader since I've been amazed at the increase of speed on this laptop compared to my old one that was around 11mb/s with a HDD. Its a 10 year old HP Elitebook.

I don't do much gaming if any at all so my main reason for the speed is moving and transferring the photo files around. I do want something reliable though so I don't end up losing any data until I get a good external SSD to backup everything to.

90D

 

If you go with Samsung, and as I mentioned in your other thread, they provide a free cloning utility you can download. I've used this to duplicate an Intel-branded boot drive to a 970 Evo, and it worked perfectly.

 

Thats still my plan at the moment, but the difference in model numbers has got me confused and was looking at other options. I don't want to accidentally purchase the incorrect drive. The Samsung agent in their chat couldn't even tell me the difference with the two names or the reason for it.

90D

 

Yeah, the SD is your limiting factor but, any NVME generation will supersede that speed. An SATA SSD would still perform better. There's a new SD Express and CF media cards coming out that push higher speeds but, nothing built in prior to their release would take advantage and need a USB/TB dongle to take advantage of the speeds.

Tech is always advancing and OEM's are always playing catch up to be to the market first with the new options that roll out it seems every 3-6 months at this point. I was doing a bit of work on microSD cards and picked up a USB-C reader / thumb drive and it worked well. I found a Patriot 128GB that hit speeds around 80MB/s which isn't bad for a $20 card. The express SD though IIRC can hit up to 800MB/s which is on par for my NVME in an enclosure.

Depending on the camera setup it might be just as well to grab an NVME / Enclosure and save directly to the drive. Depends on how you feel about either running a longer cord to a pocket or some double sided tape to the body of the camera to attach the enclosure.

Video typically only needs 10mbps per stream for HD and maybe 50-75mbps uncompressed. I have a 4-tuner in my server for catching OTA signals onto Plex for DVR but I convert them to MP4 to reduce the MP2 by 80%.

Piecing the pipeline together for optimal speed / memory / expense takes some forethought with future proofing things.

 

Yeah until or if pcie based SD cards become a standard SD card speeds probably wont see drastic differences in performance. Though I think the issue then becomes cooling of the SD card itself iirc

Not my field of interest, so this could be wrong or outdated.

 

@Tech Junky actually warned me just awhile back about the controller swapping sruff when I was looking to get a new drive. I ended up with the WD Black SN850 1TB with the Phison controller and it's been exceptional. The software support is also awesome. I've always bought Samsung so I was used to Samsung Magician software but this WD software blows that out of the water.

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There are cameras out there that use CFexpress cards, which one example of a card is the SanDisk ExtremePro 128gb CF card that has a 1700mb/s read speed. My camera doesnt use that format only, but uses SD cards up to UHS-II, which only goes up to around 300mb/s.

90D

 

Oh nice so it's at the very least dipping it's toes into the market. Thanks for sharing

 

Then the bottleneck for speed is the UHS-II. 300mbps is only about 30MB/s and even a SATA spinner can out do that. I have 3.5" drives in my server that do 200MB/s. Picking a decent NVME for other use like the OS / Apps performance is the better target. Manipulating the photos / videos (more so) is where the speed would come into play. I wouldn't over spend on the drive and focus on the durability / warranty for longevity.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/i...18000000000000&t=0&f=122080&sort=price&page=1

Plenty of options in the $180-$200 range. Some well known names and others. I would opt for WD, Team, ADATA, SP, PNY, or Mushkin. Avoid the Inland Crucial, Seagate. WD wouldn't be at the top of my list though with the controller swaps in mind at this price range and on this list the top WD is a SATA as noted with the B-M interface.

https://www.amazon.com/TEAMGROUP-T-FORCE-Graphene-Internal-TM8FP8002T0C311/dp/B08TLSM85F/ @ $179 isn't a bad bet
https://www.amazon.com/PNY-CS2130-Internal-Solid-State/dp/B0869C35V2/ @ $200 for PNY CS2130 -- I'm running the CS3030 Model in my laptop but, that would come in @ $225 but, it does 1.5GB/s in transfers on the 1TB model / 2TB should be about the same in terms of speed.

These things will run faster as shown in the synthetic testing but, real world transfers get bottlenecked / limited by other components in the systems and heat on the controllers with extended R/W operations. The synthetic resting doesn't take into account a duration long enough to accurately show the speeds other than the burst tests they perform.

@ SierraFan07 - if you're getting good speeds then you should have up to date FW already but, on some drives they need an update to unlock the full potential on the Phison controllers. Looks like that one you picked up has the E18 which should be fine. The ones I went with have the E12 on them and it was really hobbled for speeds before updating to 12.3 on both of them. By hobbled I mean slower than a spinner until unlocked with the newer firmware.

 

https://www.businesswire.com/news/h...t-to-Ship-the-New-PCIe-SD-Express-Card-SD-7.0

Here's something that we have to look forward to in the terms of speed of SD cards. 800MB/s with the new PCIe / NVME interface built into the cards and of course to take advantage of these kind of speeds the cheaper option is an external card reader until they build in the functionality to the slots on PCs. Might be a couple of years though ADATA has designed a card already / not sure when they will hit the market though.



Looks like Sony / SanDisk have a couple of options out for the CFexpress options but, they're $$$$$ ~$500+
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=sd+expre...rank&qid=1633964641&ref=sr_st_price-desc-rank

All a matter of time until the tech chain catches up with readers / cards to bring the costs down. UHS-II is still kind of pricey too @ 3X the cost of my Patriot card 128GB $20 vs $60 (avg).

800MB/s isn't something to sneeze at though when you consider the applications you can use these things in besides cameras / phones. Building a compact PC with one the size of a phone could be possible w/o losing speed to storage components. If the market would shift to these as an alternative to conventional drives there might be the ability to stack these in Laptops for a more robust storage option to allow for more redundancy than a Raid 1 w/ 2 NVME drives. In comparison you could find a way to put 4 of these things into a holder of sorts in the same footprint of an NVME.

 

might be related to Samsung changing SSD components....

Link: https://www.techspot.com/news/90998-samsung-swapping-parts-their-970-evo-plus-ssds.html

 

With the lack of chips they're putting cheaper controllers / ram on the PCB and charging the same price as the higher performance OE model. I'm sticking with someone scalping drives with the /AM model #.

With other things like Laptops or even TV's for that matter there's usually a slightly different SKU for a variant. For instance I bought a TCL 55" TV from BB and the model was 55P605 but, other stores carried the same TV but the model was 55P607 and the only difference was the remote being voice capable. Laptops will do the same for specific retailers for instance CostCo only versions or WM branded sound bars from Roku names as ONN.

An easier SKU switch is Intel WIFI cards... They have a Bulk Sku and a retail Sku that are virtually same except the last few letters. In this instance of Samsung though and it being /AM seems like it could be returns being sold or scalping. Either way there's no sense in paying more than $200 for a 2TB drive.

 

I thought perhaps the /AM may be like you mentioned with the Costco variants, being specific to Amazon, but here is what appears to be the same model number on Newegg for almost $100 more than what is being shipped and sold by Amazon.

https://www.newegg.com/samsung-970-...DTeICntnAn6NMNK6TjgaAuWpEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Here's the Amazon drive- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MFZXR1...olid=3MDGN448KOU4X&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

90D

 

Some sellers post on multiple sites and when you buy one it will updates the price / status automatically on the others. I noticed this when I bought a sounds bar on one site and double checked the others post purchase to find it sold out.

 

If you buy used be sure to ask for smart reporting bunch of people trying to dump their used up chia mining drives

 

Well I did it.

I first upgraded my RAM to 64gb using Samsung 3200mhz CL22 1.2v 32gb x2 chips. Rebooted and had a nervous couple of seconds during a black screen until the gigabyte logo finally popped up and my keyboard backlighting came on. Schwew. That was nerve racking.

After I rebooted a couple of times to make sure all was ok, I popped in a 1tb Samsung 980 Pro in the second slot, and used the Samsung data migration tool to clone the original disk. The tool shut it down, I swapped the new SSD into the primary slot, removed the old one completely, and booted again. Success! Booted right up. I rebooted a couple more times, and was happy with it.

I then took the cover back off, and installed the 2tb Samsung 970 Evo Plus in the 2nd NVME gen 3 slot, and initialized it and installed drivers.

Everything seems to be working great. I'll try to include some screen shots. The first one in the standard theme on crystaldisk is my original SSD. It was a gen 4, but seems a bit slow compared to the Samsung. The next is the Samsung 980 Pro, and then finally the gen 3 970 Evo Plus, which somewhat out-performed my gen 4 original SSD.

90D

 

Could be the slot, swap them and see if the speed changes. If the speeds are the same just leave them where they are.

 

Nicely done. I recently put in 64GB of Crucial Ballistix CL16 and the WD Black SN850. It's amazing how these two components can create a noticeable difference in daily use.

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