Samsung's 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 SSD could launch by the end of summer

nanoguy

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Rumor mill: SSD manufacturers are busy cramming more and more bits into NAND flash cells, but new software and games are catching up to take advantage of the speed characteristics of solid state storage. If word on the street is to be believed, we'll soon have a new faster PCIe 4.0 SSD on the market to see those benefits, courtesy of Samsung.

Back in January, one of the unassuming gems of CES 2020 was Samsung's 980 Pro SSD, which is still cooking in the company's labs with no official launch date in sight and lots of unanswered questions about how it'll perform in real-life tasks. In the meantime, other manufacturers have been happy to fill the gap as seen in our Best Storage guide where two PCIe 4.0 SSDs from Sabrent and Corsair topped the charts with leading performance and excellent pricing.

We know that the upcoming NVMe SSD from Samsung will be of the PCIe 4.0 variety, which means you'll soon have more choice of high-end SSDs to pair with AMD X570 and B550 motherboards, as well as Zen 3 CPUs.

According to a renown Twitter leaker, Samsung is readying the launch of the 980 Pro SSD for later this summer, which makes sense given the pandemic-related delays in supply chain and manufacturing, and the fact that the company told AnandTech to expect more information by the end of this month.

Moreover, just this week we saw a few Amazon listings for a Samsung 870 QVO SSD, which is Samsung's solution for growing game installations and archival needs of PC and console enthusiasts alike -- that could come in an 8 TB variant.

As for the 980 Pro, Samsung at CES hinted that it's geared towards performance, with lower capacities of between 250 GB and 1 TB, but sequential read speeds of up to 6,500 MB per second and write speeds of up to 5,000 MB per second. That would make it quite similar to the SSD in the PlayStation 5.

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When I saw the 8TB SSD, that became my next upgrade goal.

$899.

So you have two choices... buy now on a credit card and pay it off over time, or pay with cash upfront in a time of economic uncertainty.

Solution: give me 0% interest for 12 months!
 
The downside to all of this is that there is not a lot of Intel motherboards that I know of out there that support PCIe 4.0. I don't think I would spend the premium on getting this SSD and have it run at PCIe 3.0 speeds. Sabrent's PCIe 4.0 SSD is priced just like a PCIe 3.0, I wonder if Samsung will be competitive.
 
The pro moniker tells me it will be pricey. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see the 250gb version selling for 150-200. Maybe more.
 
It's just nice to see SSD's getting bigger and better. Finally getting into the realms off HDD space. Although they need to then catch up on prices.
HDD for me have been obsolete since the 3tb and 4tb appeared.
Having worked with a storage solution company your best bet at one point was to Raid 2tb, as the fallover rate of anything bigger for me didnt seem worth the risk, and thats one cheap HDDs. But also on the risk of any of the data being fudged and a rebuild only to fail.
And Samsungs Pro Evos writing into the Petabytes, I want!
 
No its not similar to the ps5 ssd, because that ssd is integrated into the memory subsystem in a completely different way to pc ssds. Max bandwidth is not an accurate measure of Io performance in most applications
 
Samsung have taken up the premium end of the market but we're at a stage now where I opt for cheaper alternatives because the performance difference or longevity etc is negligible.

Impressed with the likes of Sabrent, delivered their PCIe 4.0 drive ages ago and will probably deliver upgraded versions sooner or later.

Realistically alternatives will end up 95 percent as fast for 60 percent the price.
 
It's just nice to see SSD's getting bigger and better. Finally getting into the realms off HDD space. Although they need to then catch up on prices.
HDD for me have been obsolete since the 3tb and 4tb appeared.
Having worked with a storage solution company your best bet at one point was to Raid 2tb, as the fallover rate of anything bigger for me didnt seem worth the risk, and thats one cheap HDDs. But also on the risk of any of the data being fudged and a rebuild only to fail.
And Samsungs Pro Evos writing into the Petabytes, I want!


What we truly need is 10TB for $999.

8TB for $899 is a start! Samsung has one on Amazon.
 
That 8TB drive is using QLC memory = no buy.

If the 980 Pro drive is using MLC it will be very expensive.
 
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The downside to all of this is that there is not a lot of Intel motherboards that I know of out there that support PCIe 4.0. I don't think I would spend the premium on getting this SSD and have it run at PCIe 3.0 speeds. Sabrent's PCIe 4.0 SSD is priced just like a PCIe 3.0, I wonder if Samsung will be competitive.

I doubt it unfortunately. Samsung seems to continually price themselves too high under the false pretense that they are still the only competitor in the market. If Samsung can match Sabrent's pricing, then we have a winner, but if it's higher, might as well forget about Samsung for a few years until they feel some pressure to actually compete.
 
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