With the 980 Pro, Samsung is bringing its own premiere to the market. After all, this is the first consumer SSD with NVMe based on PCIe Gen4. With maximum speeds of up to 7 GByte/s, Samsung has an extremely promising SSD in the pipeline.
Product page is online
Now it is official. The 980 Pro from Samsung will probably be on the market soon. After all, the Korean company has now put the product page of the upcoming top SSD online. And this lets many fans with tension the release of the newest SSD against fever contrary. With the 980 Pro, Samsung is launching its first SSD with NVMe, which is actually aimed at end customers. Unlike the previous SSDs from Samsung, it offers a PCIe-Gen4x4 connection.
Small format
As befits an SSD in M.2 form factor, the 980 Pro comes in a small plug-in card format. Here the manufacturer uses the so-called Elpis controller. The Elpis controller celebrates its premiere with the 980 Pro and offers the appropriate RAM for the SSD. Depending on the storage capacity chosen, it supports the SSD with 512 MB or 1 GB. Apropos storage space. With the new flagship among Samsung’s SSDs you will have the choice between 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB. Unfortunately, there is no larger model – not yet at least.
Promising speeds
The first statements from Samsung already sound promising. According to the Korean company, the 980 Pro should be able to achieve a maximum sequential read rate of 7 GB/s. The maximum value applies to the version with 1 TB. But the other two versions also achieve almost as high speeds of 6.9 GB/s (512 GB) and 6.4 GB/s respectively. The new top SSD from Samsung should also be able to convince when writing. The two large versions achieve values of 5 GB/s here. The “small” 980 Pro drops here with just 2.7 GB/s compared to the competition.
Significant performance drop without buffer
Unfortunately, the impressive values of the 980 Pro should only be possible if you use the dynamic SLC buffer. If this is not active, the write speeds of the SSD will probably drop significantly. According to insider information, only 2 GB/s should be possible with the 1 TB version. The version with 512 GB/s makes it to 1.1 GB/s and the smallest version to just 500 MB/s. The reason for the significant drop in performance is probably that Samsung is not using its usual MLC flash with two bits per cell for the first time. The 980 Pro is supposed to use a TLC memory that offers three bits per cell.
The other manufacturers were faster
The Korean company is by no means the first to launch an SSD with PCIe-Gen4. Other manufacturers have already become active in this segment. For example, Corsair with the MP600, Gigabyte with the Aorus NVMe Gen4 or Seagate with the Firecuda 520 have released corresponding SSDs for sale. Most of the SSDs with PCIe-Gen4 available on the market so far rely on Phisons E16 controllers.
Price and availability
We do not yet know when the 980 Pro will be launched. However, since the new flagship has already received its own product page, the release will not be too long in coming. Nor do we know about the prices that the Korean company will be charging for the SSD.
