The Samsung 970 Evo Plus – and the Samsung 970 Evo Plus (WHL #106)
! ! ! IMPORTANT: ALSO READ WHL #106F1 FOR A MAJOR CORRECTION ON PACKAGING. ! ! !
Quick PSA, as this isn’t common knowledge and I only stumbled upon it after purchasing FIVE disks for my future RAID array…: There are TWO revisions of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD!
Sadly, I’m too lazy to either wipe off my marker or digitally remove it, so it’s not too hard to spot the difference:
Well, the two drives in the center are the newer ones, despite having date codes 02/2022 and 10/2023, while the others were made in 08/2021 and 05/2023 (!).
Thing is: They do have different firmware and apparently the newer 970 Evo Plus runs the 980 Pro “Elpis” controller, while it worked with some “Phoenix” IC when first launched. Which also means different sequential and 4K performance (higher), different operating temperatures (lower, as far as I can tell from very basic pre-RAID workloads), as well as a different size of the SLC cache (larger, almost tripled) and different write speeds after SLC cache exhaustion (lower, actually, but not an issue for me).
I’ll complete the array as is, and afterwards I will likely switch the two older drives with the current revision. They present as the exact same size, so that shouldn’t be a problem, and I also expect the rebuild to be pretty fast as it is NVMe drives, despite the bottleneck of “40” Gb/s Thunderbolt 3 from which half of the bandwidth is reserved for video loads…
How to spot them when nobody adds green marker dots to their labels? The old ones have their crystal oscillator (or at least one of them) near the small 10-pin portion of the connector, while the new ones have a similar part on the other side of the connector, moved slightly back. That should be visible even with thermal pads applied. They also got a 10-pin IC close by, but that is difficult to spot on bad photos and I just noticed when writing these lines.
If the full label is visible, Samsung also changed PN from MZVLB2T0HALB to MZVL22T0HBLB while keeping the model number MZ-V7S2T0 exactly the same. Date, as shown, is no hard indicator, some 2TB drives with the newer controller were spotted as far back as mid-2021 according to this reddit summary.
Packaging seems another distinguishing factor, as Samsung kept basically everything identical (photos, font, description), but moved from landscape to portrait packaging, as seen in previous link. No hard evidence for the used market though, as sellers might switch packaging inadvertently or don’t even have the original box anymore.
If people present SMART screenshots, firmware 4B2QEXM7 can ONLY be flashed onto the new drives. It might be possible for those to run the old 2B2QEXM7 as well (unverified), but 4B2QEXM7 are 100% newer revision drives.
Well, that’s what you get for specifically buying DRAM NVMes in 2025, as HMB (host memory buffer) does work great in standard environments, but not for eight drives over TB3…
