Pro SSD
PCI Express 4.0 SSD’s just hit the big time.
When Samsung announces a new generation of SSD, we definitely sit up and take notice. The company’s drives always make it onto prospective SSD buyers’ shortlists. 960 and 970 series NVMe drives are no slouches today, but the 980 Pro seeks to raise the bar to an all new level. PCIe 4.0 drives have been trickling onto the market ever since the launch of AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series in mid-2019, but we haven’t seen one from the big SSD players. Now that Samsung has released the 980 Pro, PCIe 4.0 drives are set to hit the big time. If you consider things like the recently announced Nvidia RTX I/O and Microsoft’s DirectStorage API, the want and need for fast storage will become more important not just for system responsiveness and fast file transfers, but will also feature as a core component of future game design.
Samsung is one of the few manufacturers to produce its SSDs entirely in house. This means it designs and manufactures its own NAND, controller and firmware. As a market leader, the inclusion of PCIe 4.0 support means 980 Pro is arguably the tipping point where PCIe 3.0 only drives begin to be relegated to the affordable end of the market. Yes, Intel still doesn’t support PCIe 4.0 but it’s all but 100% certain that Intel’s next generation platform will.
Under the hood
We have the Samsung 980 Pro 500GB in for review. It’s a standard form factor M.2 2280 (80mm length) NVMe drive that makes use of a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. In a significant change for the Pro line of drives, the 980 Pro uses Samsung’s 6th generation triple level cell V-NAND. This choice is obviously for cost and manufacturing scalability reasons as TLC is regarded as inferior to the 2-bit MLC that was found in the outgoing 970 Pro. The 980 Pro 500GB includes 4GB of SLC cache to compensate, something that wasn’t present on the 970 Pro. Despite the shift away from MLC to industry standard TLC, Samsung has managed increase sustained reads and writes to class leading levels. In addition to the SLC cache and DRAM buffer, the 980 Pro includes an updated dynamic TurboWrite cache (up to 94GB in total). That’s almost a fifth of the drive, so in practise you’re unlikely to run into too many situations where you’ll see direct to TLC write slowdowns, and if you do, that brings us to the next point.
One of the downsides of the move to TLC is the halving of the endurance ratings of the 980 Pro at each of its capacities compared to the 970 Pro. Even if very few users will approach the kinds of write levels in question, the 300TBW rating of the 500GB 980 Pro vs the 600TBW of the 500GB 970 Pro is a step backwards. It’s like this drive could have been called a 980 EVO. SLC and MLC drives seem to be destined for use in enterprise drives only going forward.
The 980 Pro uses Samsung’s
“One of the downsides of the move to TLC is the halving of the endurance ratings of the 980 Pro at each of its capacities compared to the 970 Pro.”
Elpis in house designed and built controller. It’s built on the 8nm process and supports an increased number of IO queues compared to the outgoing Phoenix controller. We speculate this could directly benefit future GPU accesses. The controller supports all the features you’d expect on a Pro series drive including TRIM, garbage collection, S.M.A.R.T. and importantly for a prosumer class drive, AES 256 bit encryption. The controller features a nickel plated heat spreader to help keep the temperatures down, which is important to prevent throttling that can occur when SSDs are pushed hard. Luckily this is less of a problem these days with many motherboards containing well designed M.2 heatsinks.
Samsung continues to offer its Magician software that offers some really useful features. You can configure the amount of over provisioning, manage encryption, perform a secure erase and even benchmark the drive. There’s also the usual set of S.M.A.R.T. information and diagnostic tools. It’s a really nice value add.
Performance
The 980 Pro 500GB is a blazing fast drive and it’s the random read performance that makes it so. It blows everything else away with the exception of some Optane drives, though they aren’t competitors at this price point. The sequential performance is the headline and also the fastest we’ve ever seen but this actually doesn’t matter too much. The 500GB model gives a little away in terms of random write performance compared to larger capacity drives, but this isn’t really important on a consumer level drive. It’s crazy to think that we’re already within touching distance of the limit of PCIe 4.0 x4 bandwidth!
Sustained write speeds are very strong, but like most drives with a cache, there comes a time when the cache becomes saturated. We don’t think this will be an issue unless you’re frequently shifting dozens of gigabytes of data around though. Our 30 GB copy/paste of a set of random files on the drive completed in just 18 seconds. That’s easily faster than the best PCIe 3.0 drives and still faster than the Phison-based Aorus PCIe 4.0 drive.
The Samsung 980 Pro is fast. Very fast. It’s the fastest NAND drive we’ve ever tested. If performance is at the top of your list, this is your drive. While Pro series drives have always gotten top marks from us and almost every other publication, this one is very good indeed, but calling it great is a step too far. Performance matters, but so do things like endurance, which doesn’t really matter for an enthusiast or gamer, but for professionals throwing around loads of data day after day – being the types of user that are attracted to Pro series drives, they are likely to be a little bit disappointed. Are we making too much of it? Perhaps, but it leaves the door open for another manufacturer to come in and sweep up prosumer customers. The likes of Intel, Western Digital and Micron are no doubt working on their PCIe 4.0 designs as we speak.
But, enough of that. The 980 Pro is still the best NAND SSD we’ve ever tested it’s also much better value vs the outgoing 970 Pro. At $229 for the 500 GB model, it’s sure to find a home as the OS drive in many builds, ourselves included.
CHRIS SZEWCZYK
The Samsung 980 Pro is blazing fast but it’s missing some of the key characteristics of its 970 predecessor.