Owners of modern PC setups will be happy about this news. The blazingly fast Samsung 980 Pro high-end SSD is now coming to Germany with 2 terabytes of storage space. Thus, the South Koreans double the previous maximum storage capacity. However, not only the storage space, but also the SDRAM cache is to be doubled.
A bang for the SSD world
Samsung is undoubtedly one of the top manufacturers for fast and reliable SSDs. But with the 980 Pro, the company launched a real gamechanger in September last year. This NVMe SSD is so fast thanks to PCIe Gen4 x4 that only a few PC setups can keep up. The blazing fast SSD was previously only available in 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB storage sizes. Now Samsung has expanded the available variants by another storage size. Finally, the SSD in the small M.2 form factor will soon be available in a size of 2 TB. However, Samsung will charge for this accordingly. Thus, the price of the high-performance SSD is supposed to be around 410 Euros.
High performance only with corresponding systems
A look at the data sheet of the upcoming version makes it clear what kind of performance we will have to deal with. With speeds of 7 GB/s (read) and 5 GB/s (write), it should be on about the same level as the variant with 1 TB of storage space. It doesn’t look any different in terms of random accesses. Here, both sizes score with a maximum of 1 million IOPS. But, to get to the maximum speed of the 80 mm M.2 card, the corresponding requirements have to be met as well. The performance of the 980 Pro can only be tickled out if you have a system that can access PCIe Gen4 x4. So far, only processors from AMD are capable of this.
Especially desktop CPUs Ryzen 3000 and Ryzen 5000 can get the maximum out of the small SSD in combination with an AM4 mainboard from the 500 series. Intel, on the other hand, has to take a beating here. At least for the time being. After all, the chip manufacturer plans to launch its new processor generation “Rocket Lake-S” in March of this year. This should finally support PCIe Gen4. Surprisingly, this is already the case on notebooks with Intel CPUs. There are now some models that use Tiger Lake-U and thus support PCIe Gen4. However, there are often problems with the maximum supported signal rate. However, it will only be a matter of time until even average PC systems can access the speeds of the 980 Pro without problems.
The cache is also supposed to get bigger
As the memory size grows, so does the cache in the new model. The reason for this is that more parts of the NAND flash memory can be operated in SLC mode. In the course of this, Samsung talks about being able to copy larger files with the larger SSD without having to accept an early drop in performance. However, even the new storage size will sooner or later collapse to about 2 GB/s in its write performance. However, this is still pretty damn fast. It is also pleasing that Samsung installs a larger SDRAM cache in the course of this. We can probably assume a 2 GB SDRAM buffer here.
