Samsung's 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 SSD is surprisingly affordable on the low end

[Shawn Knight]

Editor's take: Samsung's speedy M.2 SSD will soon be available to purchase and it's a bit more affordable (at least on the low end) than you might have expected. If you're a professional or enthusiast with a knack for speed, you'll want to keep this on your radar for an upgrade or potential future build.

Samsung on Tuesday shared additional details regarding its upcoming 980 Pro, the company’s first consumer PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid state drive. The Samsung SSD 980 Pro will be offered in capacities of 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB with sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,000 MB/s, respectively (on the higher-capacity drives).

Random read and write speeds check in at up to 1,000K IOPS, which according to Samsung, makes it up to twice as fast as PCIe 3.0 SSDs and up to 12.7 times faster than SATA SSDs.

Heat is often a byproduct of speed and that holds true here as well. To counter, Samsung has equipped its new NVMe SSDs with a nickel coating on the controller and a heat spreader on the back side to help diffuse heat.

Samsung’s new drives will be available worldwide later this month in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities with pricing starting at $89.99. The 2TB drive is scheduled to drop closer to the end of the year, Samsung said. All models will come backed by a five-year limited warranty.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/86843-samsung-980-pro-ssds-start-only-8999-250gb.html

 

[jonny888]

While I definitely don't mind that their drives are getting faster, I'd much rather they were getting larger. 1-2TB is easy to fill these days

 

[QuantumPhysics]

The next SSD I buy will be for my travel gaming laptop and it will be no less than 2TB.

I don't even look at an SSD if its capacity is below 2TB.

240GB - 1TB is nice if all you wanna load is your OS and the cloud services (icloud, onedrive, etc) but I want everything I have in one convenient drive.

 

[VitalyT]

but I want everything I have in one convenient drive.

So if it dies, you know it's everything and for good, no need to fuss around.

 

[Uncle Al]

LOL .... everything on one drive? Seriously?

 

[ColdSoup]

So if it dies, you know it's everything and for good, no need to fuss around.

Just run raid 0 and then you have two drives instead of one. /sarcasm

 

[brucek]

Are there many non-workstation platforms that have enough PCIe lanes for full performance from 2+ drives?

 

[Ludak021]

How is that affordable? ~90$ for 250GB of anything is too much today.

 

[SG736F6]

Here I am running a 512 GB 970 and can’t fill it up. Got about a dozen games installed. Everything I need and use.

 

[kiwigraeme]

I have the older 1Tb samsung PCIe 4.0 NVMe- and a 2tb ssd drive in my newer PC . More is better - so I think 2tb NVMe - 4TB SSD and 16TB - spinning rust is a better mix - Maybe hold off a year before upgrading my 2nd PC

 

[QuantumPhysics]

So if it dies, you know it's everything and for good, no need to fuss around.

Yeah, because I'd NEVER think to back up my main files in my NAS or the cloud.

 

[polord]

Maybe it is time I stop using my good old tdk tapes...

 

[netman]

Samsung just realized they do have competition from Adata on the PCIE4 speed....hence, the price drop...!

 

[jonny888]

Here I am running a 512 GB 970 and can’t fill it up. Got about a dozen games installed. Everything I need and use.

Depends what you play I guess. Some newer games can comfortably take 100GB of space these days.

 

[SixTymes]

Faster than the 970 pro, but, will not last as long as the 970 pro.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

This is more a 970 Evo replacement than 970 Pro. It is not worthy at all of the Pro label with TLC memory, often worse performance than the 970 Pro, way too expensive, and still poor power usage. There are far better options now than Samesung, really disappointed with them on all fronts, TVs, phones and now SSD's.

 

[AlphaNet]

LOL .... everything on one drive? Seriously?

I have all on one drive - The CORSAIR Force MP600 Gen4 PCIe x4 NVMe M.2 SSD - 2TB

 

[Darth Shiv]

So if it dies, you know it's everything and for good, no need to fuss around.

Cloud backups. Anyone who doesn't offsite backup important files, 1 drive or 2 or whatever, is putting their important data at risk.

 

[Darth Shiv]

This is more a 970 Evo replacement than 970 Pro. It is not worthy at all of the Pro label with TLC memory, often worse performance than the 970 Pro, way too expensive, and still poor power usage. There are far better options now than Samesung, really disappointed with them on all fronts, TVs, phones and now SSD's.

"The Samsung SSD 980 Pro will be offered in capacities of 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB with sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,000 MB/s, respectively (on the higher-capacity drives).

Random read and write speeds check in at up to 1,000K IOPS, which according to Samsung, makes it up to twice as fast as PCIe 3.0 SSDs and up to 12.7 times faster than SATA SSDs."

I don't know much that gets close to those performance figures.

 

[PEnnn]

" in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities with pricing starting at $89.99."

Well, I am so glad the prices are "plummeting" as TS has mentioned in various articles the past 2 years.....

250 GB for $89.99, seriously?? That's pathetic!!

 

[zamroni111]

The next SSD I buy will be for my travel gaming laptop and it will be no less than 2TB.

I don't even look at an SSD if its capacity is below 2TB.

240GB - 1TB is nice if all you wanna load is your OS and the cloud services (icloud, onedrive, etc) but I want everything I have in one convenient drive.

Use external usb or thunderbolt enclosure for your additional ssd storage.
You can fill it with cheaper sata or nvme pcie 3.0 ssd as game files doesn't need such high transfer rate.

 

[Darth Shiv]

" in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities with pricing starting at $89.99."

Well, I am so glad the prices are "plummeting" as TS has mentioned in various articles the past 2 years.....

250 GB for $89.99, seriously?? That's pathetic!!

Perhaps you should look at the budget end products not the performance ones?

 

[Puiu]

Here I am running a 512 GB 970 and can’t fill it up. Got about a dozen games installed. Everything I need and use.

512GB used to be enough for me, but nowadays I fill it up really fast. I'm looking to buy a second 1TB drive.

 

[Eldritch]

Reality is, none of those numbers reflect real life performance as of now. I have seen plenty of systems with simple SSD vs blazing fast NVME 2 but the difference in boot times were less than a second, loading time of apps were virtually the same and game load times were also same.
Only difference we noticed was when we did massive file copy/paste in same drive (to outer drives again gets limited by lowest common denominator speed) and when doing saving high res videos when not CPU bound (again kind of copy/pasting).
Not saying its not cool or awesome. Just that unless windows direct storage implementation is launched next year and gets adopted the year after that I.e. 2022 in best case, these numbers are just that, numbers on a spreadsheet to make you buy the RTX 2080 TI... I mean 980 Pro.

 

[Draconian]

2TB is not enough.