The new SSD 970 series uses the latest Samsung 64-layer TLC V-NAND rather than the 48-layer used by the previous generation SSD960 series. Along with the new NAND, the new drives get a new controller called Phoenix, which replaces the Polaris controller of the SSD960. Samsung has kept details of the new controller pretty close to its chest but what is known is that it uses five cores (one of which is dedicated to communication duties between the controller and the host system) and has 8 NAND channels. With the launch of the SSD970 series Samsung has also introduced the 3.0 version of their NVMe driver.

The 970 EVO comes in a range of four capacities; 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and the flagship 2TB drive which Samsung kindly supplied for review. All the drives are built on a single sided M.2 format, and to enable the 2TB drive to be single sided it uses the 512Gb die version of the 64-layer NAND, while the rest of the range uses 256Gb die NAND.