Samsung unveils SSD 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 with read speeds up to 7GB / s
Back at CES 2020, Samsung announced that it is working on the 980 Pro solid-state drives. As expected, the company introduced these SSDs in M.2 format before the end of the summer, which received a number of interesting features.
The Samsung 980 Pro NVMe 1.3c SSDs work with PCIe 4.0, making them great for powerful Zen 3-based systems and AMD X570 and B550 motherboards. Some delay in the launch was obviously caused by the pandemic as supply chains and manufacturing were affected.
The 980 Pro boasts not only formal support for a fashionable interface but also off-scale performance. The device will be released in versions of 250 GB, 500 GB, and 1 TB and will be able to offer sequential write speeds up to 5000 MB / s and sequential read – up to 7000 MB / s. Also, the SSD can offer 1 million IOPS for reading and write operations (4KB, QD32).
The drives will ship with the new Samsung Elpis controller. A significant disadvantage can be considered the use of NAND TLC, that is, up to 3 bits of data can be stored in one memory cell of new Samsung SSDs. This significantly reduces the cost of a gigabyte, but also significantly reduces the number of rewriting cycles per cell and leads to a drop in speed when the drive is full. As a result, the TBW indicator (the number of terabytes of data that can be guaranteed to be written to the drive) for the flagship 1 TB drive was only 600 (for comparison, the Corsair MP600 has a reliability level of 1800 TBW).
All stated specifications are valid for a 1TB SSD. Already in the 500 GB model, the TBW figure drops to 300, and in the 250 GB version – to 150 TB. The speed indicators are also slightly reduced: the speed of the 500 GB version hardly drops 6900 MB / s and 800,000 IOPS for reading and 5000 MB / s and 1 million IOPS for writing. But the younger model is characterized by a speed of only 6400 MB / s and 500,000 IOPS for reading and 2,700 MB / s and 600,000 IOPS for writing.
Thus, the cost reduction has now reached the Pro series, which previously used NAND MLC memory with two bits per cell. Surely this will lead to a more attractive price, but this information, as well as the exact time of the appearance of drives on store shelves, Samsung has not yet announced. 980 Pro is backed by a 5-year warranty.
