The Samsung 980 Pro is right here to take again the crown—after which some. While its predecessor, the 970 Pro, received and finally misplaced its SSD efficiency title to hotter competitors, this newest technology buries all of them.
Of course, to witness the greatness, you’ll want a pc with the PCIe 4.0 device interface, which presently means late-generation AMD Ryzen. With PCIe 3.0, the 980 Pro remains to be glorious, however merely on a par with the highest competitors.
This evaluation is a part of our ongoing roundup of the best SSDs. Go there for data on competing merchandise and the way we examined them.
Design and specs
The 980 Pro sports activities the identical 2280 (22 mm huge, 80 mm lengthy) kind issue as all mainstream NVMe SSDs, and it arrives naked—no warmth spreader included.
The controller is a Samsung in-house Elpis design. The NAND is Samsung’s TLC V-NAND, which the corporate refers to as 3-bit MLC. Samsung knowledgeable me that there are “1xx” layers within the NAND. What the heck which means, I can’t inform you, however with 40 p.c extra capability it possible means there are round 128 layers.
The DDR4 DRAM cache varies by capability. You get 512MB of cache on the 256GB drive ($90 when it turns into accessible) and 512GB drive ($150 when accessible), and 1GB of cache on the 1TB mannequin we examined ($230 when accessible). The yet-to-be-priced 2TB mannequin can have 2GB of cache.
Those sticker costs place the Samsung 980 Pro within the higher tier of NVMe SSDs by value per gigabyte. In quick, it’s costly. The drives carry a five-year restricted guarantee. The restrict is 150TBW per 256GB of capability score. TBW stands for TeraBytes Written over the lifetime of the drive.
That score is a bit low for a premium-priced drive. Still, it represents 41GB written per day over 10 years—much more knowledge than the common consumer will write (reads don’t depend). A big a part of the logic behind tying warranties to TBW scores is to discourage enterprise use of cheaper client SSDs.
Samsung’s 980 Pro blows away each NVMe SSD we’ve examined when used together with PCIe 4.0. With PCIe 3.0, it’s nonetheless top-notch, however not practically as spectacular. Especially given the value and considerably low TBW score.
Performance
The 980 Pro greater than lived as much as Samsung’s claims of 7GBps studying and 5GBps writing by way of PCIe 4, at the very least with CrystalDiskMark 6, which we use for comparability with a big physique of earlier testing. Real-life transfers can’t contact any of the artificial outcomes, as Windows has change into a fairly giant bottleneck in efficiency, however the 980 Pro nonetheless aced them.
Again, PCIe 4 presently means late-gen AMD Ryzen. Rumors counsel Intel may help PCIe 4 with its upcoming 11th-gen Rocket Lake CPUs, however nothing’s confirmed.
Normally, we don’t submit display screen grabs of exams, however this one is value a gander. The numbers turned in by the Samsung 980 Pro are spectacular certainly. Note that the numbers are from a 1TB model of the 980 Pro. Samsung additionally despatched a 256GB mannequin, which posted roughly the identical numbers.
Normally we don’t present CDM outcomes as display screen grabs, however that is so spectacular we needed to, even when they don’t fairly maintain up underneath actual world OS use.
I’ve in contrast the 980 Pro to the opposite PCIe 4 NVMe SSD we’ve examined—the Phison 16-based Seagate FireCuda 520. While the 980 Pro cleaned its clock when it comes to sustained throughput, the FireCuda 520 really bested the 980 Pro in a number of random 4K exams which aren’t proven. Not by rather a lot, however sufficient to say it.
The 980 Pro is much sooner than the Phison-based Seagate FireCuda 520 on this check, and our 48GB switch exams—with PCIe 4. The 980 Pro can be quick with PCIe 3, however not sufficient to warrant the premium worth.
The real-world 48GB switch outcomes under are additionally very spectacular, and make the 980 Pro the primary PCIe 4 drive we’ve examined to exhibit an actual world benefit in sustained transfers. Here the FireCuda 520 was no match.
If you’re fortunate sufficient to have a Ryzen and PCIe 4, you’ll love the 980 Pro which shaved greater than a minute off of the earlier quickest mixture 48GB switch time.
Okay, now for a fast dose of actuality. If you throw sufficient knowledge on the 980 Pro, write speeds will drop from 2.25GBps to round 1.75MBps. We seen this on the 450GB copy proven under.
This delicate drop from 2.25GBps to 1.75GBps occurred on the 30%/135GB mark.
If you occur to catch the drive whereas it’s doing housekeeping, or there’s not sufficient NAND left (if the drive is nearing full) to assign some as secondary cache, write speeds can drop as little as 350MBps.
I noticed this as soon as whereas testing the 256GB mannequin. It transpired after a number of 48GB transfers, adopted nearly instantly by a TRIM operation, after which one other 48GB single file copy. It by no means occurred underneath regular use.
Sustained write dips usually are not a sensible concern 99.9 p.c of the time with the bigger capacities, or 99 p.c of the time with decrease capacities. But it illustrates simply how essential cache and caching algorithms are to efficiency in at this time’s NVMe SSDs.
The PCIe 3 exams utilized Windows 10 64-bit working on a Core i7-5820Ok/Asus X99 Deluxe system with 4 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (NVidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM2142 USB 3.1 card. It additionally incorporates a Gigabyte GC-Alpine Thunderbolt 3 card, and Softperfect Ramdisk 3.4.6 for the 48GB learn and write exams.
The PCIe 4 testing was performed on an MSI MEG X570 motherboard socketing an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core CPU and utilizing the identical Kingston DDR and software program.
A no brainer in the event you’re PCIe 4, not a lot with PCIe 3
The Samsung 980 Pro is a good NVMe SSD—the quickest we’ve ever examined utilizing the PCIe 4.0 bus. If you’re fortunate or good sufficient to personal a late-gen Ryzen system, it’s the one you need.
With PCIe 3.0, you’re unlikely to note the distinction between the 980 Pro and drives costing half as a lot, of which there are actually fairly a couple of. Throw within the low TBW score, and it’s not one of the best deal, particularly for 4K or 8K enhancing workload, which might contain loads of knowledge. Then once more, you’ll be future-proofed for PCIe 4 whenever you replace your PC. It’s your name on that one.