Play Games
9 months ago
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$56 cheaper than it was in March.
It's not just me - NVMe SSD prices have gotten absolutely wild recently, right? Today we spotted a deal on the 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus, formerly one of the very fastest SSDs on the market. It normally retails for $100, but today it's down to an even more incredible $74 at Amazon - not bad for a drive that originally retailed at $500 and cost $100 more in January!
Samsung's 970 Evo Plus has come a long way since we reviewed it in 2019, when we were impressed with its performance but saddened by its higher-than-expected price.
These days, the 970 Evo Plus ranks as one of the most reliable PCIe 3.0 SSDs, thanks to its Samsung-made TLC NAND, DRAM cache and controller, not quite equalling the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs in terms of outright speeds but undercutting them dramatically in terms of price. (For context, Samsung's latest 990 Pro SSD costs $169 for a 2TB version, while the slightly slower 980 Pro is still pricey at $119).
If you're installing this drive into a PC that doesn't support the newer PCIe 4.0 standard, then the 970 Evo Plus is the obvious choice - and even if your machine would benefit from the faster speeds, you'll have to weigh up whether fractionally faster loading times are worth your particular use case. For your standard "starting up Windows" and "loading a new game" kinds of usage, there's no appreciable difference between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 drives, even in the most demanding sections of recent Direct Storage enabled games like Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, according to testing down by my team at Digital Foundry.
To sum up then - this is a fantastic SSD for the money and well worth picking up to expand your PC's storage, whether as your new primary OS drive or just for additional game storage.
