[throwaway8941]

>the additional performance is not always worth the additional price per GB

There are factors besides performance. Samsung is not known for particularly high quality firmware (the 830 Evo performance fuck-up, multiple queued TRIM bugs, etc.), but after reading a disproportionate amount of horror stories of silent data corruption and data loss for most of their competition, I'd rather spend the extra bucks.

[leetcrew]

what I mean is, the typical consumer will probably never notice the performance difference between a 970 evo plus (or even 970 pro) versus any other middle-of-the-pack nvme drive. I personally went with the evo plus because I expect the drive to spend its life mostly full and I'm using it to compile c++ projects from. the extra $50 was worth the most consistent performance to me.

as for reliability, this is hard to judge from anecdotes on the internet. you really need access to something like the backblaze data to start drawing conclusions. I had an oem samsung drive die in my xps 13 a week after the one year warranty expired. I have a WD hard drive that's still going strong after eight years. unless you have a lot of data, I think it's best to just back everything up, accept that you're rolling the dice, and hit a $/perf point that's acceptable to you.