The SPEEEEEED. Making the move to the 970 PRO was a bit iffy for me as it was my first venture in the M.2 socket drives. I have never looked back from my first boot. The amount of speed and responsiveness I get from the drive is light years ahead of any of my previous SSD drives and we won't even talk about the difference over the old fashion platter drives. For most people, the 512GB 970 PRO will be more than enough for every day use. If you're looking for a LOT of storage space, you may want to bump it to the 1TB version or look at an external drive for things like music, pictures, and documents that you need or want to hold on to. I have had zero regrets with this drive and I'm quite sure you won't either.

Best NVMe SSD on the market.

The Samsung 970 Pro NVMe SSD is the best NVMe SSD on the market today. This is the only SSD that still uses the premium MLC V-NAND Flash. This flash has much better endurance and reliability than Triple Level Cell NAND or TLC. This drive doesn't slow down as you fill the drive with data. Competitors advertise similar performance numbers but, when you start to fill those drives, they slow down dramatically especially for writes. This is the only NVMe SSD that is awesome for any workload, it just keeps going. I highly recommend the 970 Pro for professional and enthusiast usage because of the amazing sustained performance and high reliability.

Great agent - quite competent yet over-worked

My machine was returned with the side panel unattached. No big deal there. But the installation Win 10 on the new boot drive wrecked havoc with Adobe Lightroom. I lost LR access to 140,000 images. As a professional photog, that hurts. Adobe tells me that re-installing Win 10 can reassign HDD drive letters that LR depends on for finding photos. MS says it was avoidable. I will have to re-import all the images - and likely have to re-edit thousands of them - likely several weeks of tedious work.

Mark's review of SAMSUNG 512GB 950 PRO M.2

Pros: Quick - depending on what settings you can use ie x4 or standard. This will depend on the number of expansion slots you are already using, sata hard drives installed and lanes your motherboard allows. Do some research and ask some questions of your motherboard suppleir before diving in. Rliability unable to comment so a 5, its new hard to say but does have a 5 year or xTB transfer warranty.Cons: Restricts the number of expansion slots and/or sata hard drive slots depending on the number of lanes your motherboard has.I seem to be having resource issues between the .m2 slots and cpu. Seem to have yellow exclamation marks next to CPU driver, unresolved but system runs fine. Not getting the transfer rates advertised. to be continued...

Michal's review of SAMSUNG 512GB 950 PRO M.2

Pros: With the current NAND flash oversupply, you would be wise to purchase an NVMe SSD such as this one. The performance is simply stellar; there's no other way to put it. I managed to get speeds comfortably over the advertised 3400R/1500W MB/s, so I'm more than happy. Using it as a boot drive, my PC turns on and loads start-up apps significantly faster than with a regular SATA3 SSD! Cannot recommend it enough. Just make sure your motherboard NVMe slot or PCI-E NVMe expansion card supports the high bandwidth. Fun fact, you can get NVMe supported Type-C enclosures on the internet for a blazing fast portable SSD.Cons: Only thing I'm slightly worried about is the 150TBW / 5 year warranty (whichever expires first). I'd like to have the extra security the PRO series ... MorePros: With the current NAND flash oversupply, you would be wise to purchase an NVMe SSD such as this one. The performance is simply stellar; there's no other way to put it. I managed to get speeds comfortably over the advertised 3400R/1500W MB/s, so I'm more than happy. Using it as a boot drive, my PC turns on and loads start-up apps significantly faster than with a regular SATA3 SSD! Cannot recommend it enough. Just make sure your motherboard NVMe slot or PCI-E NVMe expansion card supports the high bandwidth. Fun fact, you can get NVMe supported Type-C enclosures on the internet for a blazing fast portable SSD.Cons: Only thing I'm slightly worried about is the 150TBW / 5 year warranty (whichever expires first). I'd like to have the extra security the PRO series provides (300TBW per 256GB as opposed to 150TBW per 250GB), but there's obviously a reason it's called the PRO series and I'm fine with that. For anyone else using this as a boot drive I wouldn't worry too much about the TBW (you probably won't be writing to it all that often unless it's your one and only drive) but if you're constantly erasing old triple-A games and downloading new ones then you might want to look into the 970 PROs.

Nice Upgrade

I was running a 960 PRO NVMe M.2 500GB in an M** Z370 Sli Plus. I ran short of storage space and added the 970 PRO NVMe M.2 1TB. I used the Samsung data migration tool to move everything over from the 960 to the 970 and now use the 960 as extra storage. The transfer was extremely fast from 960 to 970 and everything went well with no problems. I was really impressed by the 970. I did not think I would notice much difference, but wow, with the same bios settings for fast boot that the 960 was using, my boot time is crazy fast and read and writes, according to Samsung Magician, are much better than the 960.I recommend this product and would purchase it again.

Read speeds great, slow write speeds.

i have an amd ace x570 based motherboard with a ryzen 3900x cpu. latest amd drivers and bios loaded, with samsung magician installed.in crystaldiskmark v8.0, my 980 pro shows seq1 r:6404/w:1262, rnd4k r:1177/w:1064. my 970 evo shows seq1 r:3275/w:2497, rnd4k r:1186/w:1163.while i see 2x the read speed of my 970, i am also seeing 1/2x the write speed of my 970. no real solution yet, from my searches.do your research before purchasing. i would recommend getting a 970 evo for now.

The best NVME SSD drive on the market, period!

This is by far the quickest SSD I’ve ever owned. It not only meets, but exceeds its rated speeds in both Samsung’s excellent Magician software and CrystalDiskMark’s industry standard tests! I put it in my Dell XPS 8930 and cloned my old Samsung SSD drive in literally minutes. Using Samsung’s free Data Migration software, this was by far the fastest and easiest drive I have ever installed. It literally took me less than 10 minutes! Of all the SSD drives available, I’ve found Samsung’s to be the most dependable by far, and coupled with their excellent free software, you just can’t be beat their SSDs in my opinion.

The hardware works well, Image transfer eh

I installed this Samsung 970 Pro m.2 SSD drive into an HP ZBook G3 17. Seems to work very well after several days. My system used to take over 9 minutes to boot from a cold start. It now is totally ready in about a minute and 45 seconds. I'm not sure if this HP takes full advantage of the drive, but it is a great improvement.I used Active@ Disk Image software rather than the Samsung supplied software to transfer my files. I saw others used similar products for the transfer.The problem I saw was that the Samsung transfer software ran on top of my regular Windows installation and it fairly cautioned me that any running programs (locked files) would not be copied. Since there are a lot of background operations running, I didn't know how I could be sure to get ... MoreI installed this Samsung 970 Pro m.2 SSD drive into an HP ZBook G3 17. Seems to work very well after several days. My system used to take over 9 minutes to boot from a cold start. It now is totally ready in about a minute and 45 seconds. I'm not sure if this HP takes full advantage of the drive, but it is a great improvement.I used Active@ Disk Image software rather than the Samsung supplied software to transfer my files. I saw others used similar products for the transfer.The problem I saw was that the Samsung transfer software ran on top of my regular Windows installation and it fairly cautioned me that any running programs (locked files) would not be copied. Since there are a lot of background operations running, I didn't know how I could be sure to get everything. I did not proceed.The Active@ image software (and others) I used boots from a USB stick outside of Windows and does not have that restriction. After the transfer, I did have to boot from a recovery instance to make the UEFI GPT, (the new style partition table, system bootable, but that is not an issue with the Samsung drive at all, it's a Windows thing.

Unbelievable speed & so tiny

Bought this for the Gigabyte Designare EX X299 for my new build. Insane speed. Glad we're getting back to parallel data lanes over serial.That said, and I'll be honest, having used a Revodrive X2 for the past 7 years, I haven't quite managed to see any significant "real-world" difference with app loading and windows booting etc, but numbers speak for themselves (see attached photo - 970 Pro on left, Revodrive in middle, normal WD Gold 2TB HDD on right). What amazes me is the size of the thing; it's minuscule.It tops out at 3600MB/s sequential read when the 970 Pro is plugged into an NVMe running off CPU PCIe lanes. You may find it slightly lower (3250MB/s) when it is plugged into an NVMe port which shares SATA/chipset lanes from my own evidence. However, ... MoreBought this for the Gigabyte Designare EX X299 for my new build. Insane speed. Glad we're getting back to parallel data lanes over serial.That said, and I'll be honest, having used a Revodrive X2 for the past 7 years, I haven't quite managed to see any significant "real-world" difference with app loading and windows booting etc, but numbers speak for themselves (see attached photo - 970 Pro on left, Revodrive in middle, normal WD Gold 2TB HDD on right). What amazes me is the size of the thing; it's minuscule.It tops out at 3600MB/s sequential read when the 970 Pro is plugged into an NVMe running off CPU PCIe lanes. You may find it slightly lower (3250MB/s) when it is plugged into an NVMe port which shares SATA/chipset lanes from my own evidence. However, Crystalmark didn't show a lot of difference in the 7 other tests, including all read tests, so the non-HEDT crew don't have to worry.Very easy to install, with windows 10 and an up to date motherboard its just.... there... no additional drivers required.The ARM controller does get hot though - I would recommend a heatsink (which are widely available for NVMe drives) to prevent it throttling under heavy loading.Good pricing considering it's top-of-the-range and blistering speed. Keen to see more from the Samsung 970 range - 110mm 4TB version?