Samsung has lifted the lid on its first consumer PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), a drive aimed at professionals and consumers who demand the best from their PCs, workstations, and game consoles.
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Samsung 980 PRO
The 980 PRO features Samsung's custom Elpis controller, V-NAND, and DRAM to unlock the best possible performance from PCIe 4.0.
What are the benefits?
Speed.
Lots of speed.
The 980 PRO offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,000 MB/s respectively, along with random read and write speeds of up to 1,000K IOP.
That's two times faster than PCIe 3.0 SSDs and a whopping 12.7 times faster than SATA SSDs.
| Interface | PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe 1.3c |
| Form Factor | M.2 (2280) |
| Storage Memory | Samsung 1xx-layer V-NAND 3-bit MLC |
| Controller | Samsung Elpis Controller |
| DRAM | 1GB LPDDR4 (1TB) 512MB LPDDR4 (500GB, 250GB) |
| Capacity | 1TB, 500GB, 250GB |
| Sequential Read/Write Speed | Up to 7,000 MB/s, Up to 5,000 MB/s |
| Random Read/Write Speed | Up to 1,000K IOPS, 1,000K IOPS |
| Management Software | Samsung Magician Software |
| Data Encryption | AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0, Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667) |
| Total Bytes Written | 600TB (1TB) 300TB (500GB) 150TB (250GB) |
| Warranty | Five-year Limited Warranty |
All this performance generates a lot of heat, and to deal with this, Samsung has done away with copper heatsinks, replacing them with a nickel coating on the controller and designing the label on the back to act as a heat spreader. This isn't penny-pinching, instead, it is clever engineering that allows everything to fit into the M.2 form factor.
The Samsung SSD 980 PRO comes in 1TB, 500GB, and 250GB models, and will be available later this month.
Prices are very reasonable -- $89.99 for the 250GB model, $149.99 for the 500GB model, and $229.99 for the 1TB model.