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The 970 PRO comes in a small black box. While there aren't a lot of details on the front, the back of the box advertises some of the drive's key features including its V-NAND technology, NVMe interface and 5 year warranty. Inside, you'll find the SSD as well as a small installation guide and warranty statement.
Physical Features:
The 970 PRO uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 80.15 x 22.15 x 2.38 mm and tips the scales at a mere 8.0g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.
Like the PM981 and 970 EVO, the 970 PRO uses Samsung's new Phoenix controller. The controller's technical specs are confidential so we don't know a lot about it yet. However, Samsung did let us know that in addition to it supporting the latest NVMe 1.3 specification, the Phoenix controller has a new nickel coating that dissipates heat. Like the older Polaris controller, one core is also dedicated to processing data sent between the host system and the controller. However, with the Phoenix, it runs at a higher clock speed for faster data transfer rates.
For the 512GB version of the 970 PRO, Samsung used their own 64-layer, 2-bit MLC V-NAND flash chips. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there are two 256GB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB. The drive also has a single 512MB LPDDR4 DRAM memory chip that is used for caching.
