Samsung 970 Pro vs Evo NVMe M.2 in Laptop

[Pecacheu]

So fairly simple question... I'm getting an SSD for my laptop.

 

It's a fairly powerful laptop, but I bought it with the lowest drive option available, intending to upgrade it myself (due to the insane premium OEMs charge on storage). Would've done the same for the RAM but alas, the OLED display is only available at the highest RAM config (the bastards, lol)

 

I've already checked online that it takes full-length NVMe M.2 drives and all that. However my question is if the extra price of the Samsung 970 Pro SSD is really worth it, almost double the price of the 970 Evo and 970 Evo Plus. I know it does show some impressive numbers, particularly in sustained performance... Which would probably be good since I'll be doing some rendering work and whatnot in addition to gaming.

 

But at the end of the day it would just be in a laptop (CPU is 10th gen i7-10750H btw). So would the laptop probably bottleneck the performance enough that it doesn't even make a difference if I go with any random generic brand 512GB M.2 SSD anyway? Would I basically be burning my money getting the 970 Pro? Or does it perform basically the same as in a desktop?

[xdeathshot20]

im pretty sure that the 970 evo plus acually has higher speeds then the 970 pro.  If i remember correctly the advantage to the 970 pro was just the warranty and maybe rated for slightly longer longevity but thats about it.  I would go with prob the 970 evo/plus 

[Electronics Wizardy]

What type of rendering, normally its not super storage intensive.

 

Id save the money and get a midrange nvme drive, you won't notice the performane difference.

 

The evo is tlc and the pro is mlc, the differnce won't matter for almost all laptop workloads.

[Pecacheu]

26 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What type of rendering, normally its not super storage intensive.

 

Id save the money and get a midrange nvme drive, you won't notice the performane difference.

 

The evo is tlc and the pro is mlc, the differnce won't matter for almost all laptop workloads.

Video editing/rendering, so I figure that the SSD performance would effect stuff like scrubbing performance and delays of pulling up project files and all that.

 

I'm in a sorta awkward position where I need a thin-and-light tablet with a stylus to be able to do digital art and photo editing work, but also the very same machine has to be powerful enough for smooth 4K video editing and rendering.

 

Honestly, it's pretty cool that such a PC is actually possible now. My last tablet PC I've been using for design work is from ages ago in the early Windows 8 tablet era... Was pricey as hell, yet performance was such utter garbage that I had to swap files between desktop and laptop constantly to be able to get any work for a project done at a reasonable pace.

 

Also didn't know that about the Evo and Pro. Is there also a reliability difference between the two? (Though I'm sure the Evo is perfectly reliable to begin with)

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Pecacheu said:

ideo editing/rendering, so I figure that the SSD performance would effect stuff like scrubbing performance and delays of pulling up project files and all that.

what bitrate and codec and footage type?

 

Most of the time, any ssd will be plenty for compressed footage. Id get a cheaper ssd, like a sn550 or sx8200 pro, you won't notice the speed difference.

 

1 minute ago, Pecacheu said:

Also didn't know that about the Evo and Pro. Is there also a reliability difference between the two? (Though I'm sure the Evo is perfectly reliable to begin with)

Backup your data, and you won't lose any thing, but both should have a simmilar failure rate. The pro has better write endurance, but your not going to use it up from what you have listed.

[Pecacheu]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

what bitrate and codec and footage type?

 

Most of the time, any ssd will be plenty for compressed footage. Id get a cheaper ssd, like a sn550 or sx8200 pro, you won't notice the speed difference.

 

Backup your data, and you won't lose any thing, but both should have a simmilar failure rate. The pro has better write endurance, but your not going to use it up from what you have listed.

So basically there's really no reason for the average user to get a 970 in the first place?

 

I would probably at least get the basic 970 Evo though if not the Pro, the price of that one isn't much off from any NVMe SSD from a reliable brand if you look around a little.

[Pecacheu]

1 hour ago, xdeathshot20 said:

im pretty sure that the 970 evo plus acually has higher speeds then the 970 pro.  If i remember correctly the advantage to the 970 pro was just the warranty and maybe rated for slightly longer longevity but thats about it.  I would go with prob the 970 evo/plus 

I was mainly looking at an article comparing them and also this site: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-970-Pro-NVMe-PCIe-M2-512GB-vs-Samsung-970-Evo-NVMe-PCIe-M2-500GB/m498971vsm493995 Which puts it 24% faster (to be fair that's less than what the articles said)

 

I love that site it's great for looking at benchmarks for just about every different PC component

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Pecacheu said:

I was mainly looking at an article comparing them and also this site: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-970-Pro-NVMe-PCIe-M2-512GB-vs-Samsung-970-Evo-NVMe-PCIe-M2-500GB/m498971vsm493995 Which puts it 24% faster (to be fair that's less than what the articles said)

 

I love that site it's great for looking at benchmarks for just about every different PC component

Don't use that site, the bencharmks are reallly bad, esp the summary,  review sites are much better.

 

1 hour ago, Pecacheu said:

So basically there's really no reason for the average user to get a 970 in the first place?

 

I would probably at least get the basic 970 Evo though if not the Pro, the price of that one isn't much off from any NVMe SSD from a reliable brand if you look around a little.

Yea the 970 is overkill for almost all uses. 

 

price wise a sn550 is about 120 usd, and the 970 is about 170, so id say that a large price difference. 

[Pecacheu]

Yeah I think I'll probably be going with the 970 Evo Plus 500GB. I've looked around at a few more sources and videos and the performance difference is negligible, though the Pro does seem to often (not always) win just slightly. And as xdeathshot20 said, on paper the Evo Plus is actually listed as faster write speed.

 

And looking around for good deals it can be had for around the same price as the Evo ($95-$100 new), whereas I can't find a brand new 970 Pro 512GB for below $150 and most are around Amazon's price of $170. (So yeah unless you care about that extra 12GB I suppose there's basically no reason not to go Evo Plus, lol)

[Pecacheu]

7 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Don't use that site, the bencharmks are reallly bad, esp the summary,  review sites are much better.

You say that, but I feel like it's the opposite... I mean I'm sure they're fairly reliable, but review sites are only a sample size of 1, plus sometimes they're testing pre-production or review units.

 

Sometimes in the field, parts end up having different performance than they do on paper. That site is an aggregate of millions of user's benchmarks so it's a much larger sample size. Sure, you could argue that low-quality data (aka 'idiots') are inevitable when users are involved in anything, but still the data is a weighted average... And I feel like the average person's rig is going to inevitably not show the peak theoretical performance of most of it's parts, so if anything that site is more realistic to what you're likely to see hooking up 'part X' to your system assuming your rig isn't like, the $60 million Frontera supercomputer at UT.

 

That's how I see it at least.

[Electronics Wizardy]

19 minutes ago, Pecacheu said:

You say that, but I feel like it's the opposite... I mean I'm sure they're fairly reliable, but review sites are only a sample size of 1, plus sometimes they're testing pre-production or review units.

 

Sometimes in the field, parts end up having different performance than they do on paper. That site is an aggregate of millions of user's benchmarks so it's a much larger sample size. Sure, you could argue that low-quality data (aka 'idiots') are inevitable when users are involved in anything, but still the data is a weighted average... And I feel like the average person's rig is going to inevitably not show the peak theoretical performance of most of it's parts, so if anything that site is more realistic to what you're likely to see hooking up 'part X' to your system assuming your rig isn't like, the $60 million Frontera supercomputer at UT.

 

That's how I see it at least.

Have you seen the news about them lately, very miss leading data with the % they give regarding what is better.

This is an example https://www.tweaktown.com/news/66768/userbenchmark-adjusting-cpu-rankings-pandering-intel/index.html

 

Even if you look at those drives, the 970 pro is better at one task, and then wins the total, while the evo is better in most other areas.

 

The numbers they give don't make sense for a lot of the total ratings, and aren't just performance aswell, they include other things that don't seem to make sense. 

 

A reviewer knows much more contex about performance of drives, and puts real world tests on the drives aswell.

 

[Pecacheu]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Have you seen the news about them lately, very miss leading data with the % they give regarding what is better.

This is an example https://www.tweaktown.com/news/66768/userbenchmark-adjusting-cpu-rankings-pandering-intel/index.html

 

Even if you look at those drives, the 970 pro is better at one task, and then wins the total, while the evo is better in most other areas.

 

The numbers they give don't make sense for a lot of the total ratings, and aren't just performance aswell, they include other things that don't seem to make sense. 

 

A reviewer knows much more contex about performance of drives, and puts real world tests on the drives aswell.

 

Well that's a particular controversy against that particular site, and one that I was not aware of, not necessarily something wrong with the general concept.

 

Besides I'm not sure how much water the "bias towards Intel theory" holds given the literal front page of their website is boasting how excellent a value the new Ryzen 3300X is (which I sure won't disagree with, pretty awesome release IMO)

 

Plus you're not going to be able to find reviews on a lot of more obscure parts or variants of parts that you can easily find on that site. Still if anyone has a good alternative I'd be open to trying it.

 

I've submitted a number of benchmarks to that site and it's got a really neat feature to see how each of your system's parts line up compared to others after running the benchmark. I haven't really seen a good competitor to the site frankly, that said I haven't really looked around.

[Pecacheu]

Also I might be derailing my own thread here a bit lol. But I think my question's been answered.

 

Not sure how much the mods here like to crack the whip and lock threads, I'm kinda new here despite having an account for a while