Samsung 970 EVO M.2 500GB NVMe SSD review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon DSLR shooting 12 MegaPixel photos. Right then, packaging.
 

As always we start off with packaging. Samsung uses its traditional black packaging with orange marking the EVO series. Inside the lightweight package, we received the 500 GB sample. Performance is listed as 3400 MB/s for reads and 2300 MB/sec for writes with roughly 400K IOPS at 4k random writes QD32 aligned disk access with our tested model. 

Above, the tested unit; you should easily be able to place the M.2 unit into a compatible motherboard. Most 2017/2018 with chipsets support it. You should, however, check out with the motherboard manufacturer if you have an x4 lane PCIe Gen 3.0 version with NVMe protocol support. The latest Windows 10 iteration has an up-to-date NVMe 1.3 protocol driver natively, so you do not necessary to install a 3rd party driver. Samsung will offer one nonetheless. 

 
The compact M.2 2280 form factor ensures compatibility with next-generation desktop and mobile platforms that support the M.2 PCIe slot and interface. The 80 on 2280 is short for 80mm, aka, that is the length of the card and 2280, you guessed it now .. 22mm for its width. It really is that simple. 
  

We'll use the M.2 unit on an Intel Z270 platform. An M2 unit can withstand the physical shock of up to 1500G/0.5ms and vibrations up to 20G. 
 

 
Samsung offers a 5-year limited warranty up to 150 / 300 / 600 Terabytes written (TBW) for the 250 GB, 500 GB and 1TB EVO versions (respectively). That is still pretty nice endurance to be honest.