Samsung 980 Pro Heatsink 1TB

FOR AN AWFULLY long time, Samsung was the gold standard when it came to SSDs. Year after year, when Samsung released its latest premium SSD, it went straight to the top of the performance tables. It was a textbook example of how the sheer engineering might of one of the world’s biggest tech companies made for a competitive advantage.

Funnily enough, that was still pretty much the case when Samsung wheeled out the standard 980 Pro. And this 980 Pro Heatsink 1TB is largely the same drive. So, that makes it a nailed-on certainty for the win, right? Actually, no. The problem is that the 980 Pro was launched way back in the Fall of 2020. The market has since moved on and the 980 Pro has been marginally overtaken.

The big news with this iteration of the 980 Pro is the heatsink. Samsung says the heatsink has been optimized courtesy of “data center technology” to dissipate heat efficiently from the controller chip, which is, of course, Samsung’s own design.

If that sounds a bit like marketing fluff, then what we can say for certain is that the heatsink takes this M.2 drive’s thickness to 8.5mm. Not at all coincidentally, that makes it fully compatible with the Sony PS5 game console, which is really why this new variant exists. As for how much sense it makes on the PC, we’ll come to momentarily.

Beyond that, there’s little else new to report, the tech specs are the same as at launch 18 months ago. That doesn’t mean this SSD is totally outclassed, however. Far from it. You get 1GB of DDR4 cache, a five-year warranty, and, of course, Samsung’s own high-quality TLC NAND memory. More to the point, this is still a cuttingedge PCIe Gen 4 drive with pretty stellar read and write speeds of 7GB/s and 5GB/s respectively. Samsung also says it will do no fewer than one million IOPS, which is as good as any NAND-based SSD we know of.

Not as impressive is the maximum 144GB of space the drive can allocate to operate in speedy SLC mode. Notably, that’s less than the two other 1TB drives here, which both allocate up to 300GB. How much that will actually matter in practice is debatable. Arguably, most users will find that 144GB is plenty for sustained performance. But it can’t be totally ignored.

In any case, our testing confirms that sustained throughput does indeed drop after roughly 140GB of sustained writes. As for operating temperatures, we registered a peak of 53°C sustained load, which is just fine for both sustained performance and overall longevity.

By other performance metrics, this slight tweak to the existing Samsung 980

Pro is unsurprisingly a dead ringer for the original. So, it’s a very quick SSD, but not quite as speedy as most of the newer PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives in this group. 6.7GB/s reads and 4.9GB/s writes are nice numbers in isolation. But the fact is they are bested, even by the Crucial P5 Plus, which is a cheaper drive positioned in a more mainstream part of the market.

Of course, some would argue that such measures of peak sequential performance are somewhat academic in the real world. Once you’ve got several GB/s of throughput, the details don’t matter that much.

Even if that is true, the

980 Pro is still behind when you factor in 4K random access. 4K write performance of 200MB/s is particularly weak compared to all but the Crucial P5 Plus.

All of that would actually be fine were it not for one small snag. The 980 Pro Heartsink is priced like it’s right at the top of the performance tree. But it isn’t, not quite. So, for that reason alone, it’s hard to recommend for the PC.