Unveiled 8 months ago at the CES 2020 exhibition, the Samsung 980 Pro SSDs are officially available in three capacity versions: 250GB, 500GB and 1TB.
Designed for the next generation of PCIe 4.0 motherboards, they promise speeds of up to 7000 MB / s for sequential data read operations and 5000 MB / s for write checks.
Samsung 980 PRO SSDs are based on the standard M.2 format, have a 5-year warranty and are aimed at consumers who focus on maximizing performance, at the expense of a slightly higher purchase cost.
Currently, only PCs that use AMD’s Ryzen 3000 CPUs, installed in X570 chipset motherboards, have PCIe 4.0 slots. Intel is likely to add the necessary compatibility with the launch of the 11th generation of Intel Core processors.
Samsung uses the Elpsism controller for the new storage device, capable of reaching IOPS speeds of up to 1 million operations per second on data read / write tasks. These devices also have 1 GB of cached LPDDR4 RAM, the data eventually being stored in 3-bit MLC V-NAND memory chips. With the new SSDs, the company is currently abandoning the 4-bit TLC memory per cell, which was used on the 970 EVO devices.
With the help of the PCIe 4.0 standard, the company managed to double the read / write performance compared to the previous generation SSDs. The South Korean company has not yet announced the prices for the new SSD 980 Pro range, but we can expect them to be offered at prices comparable to the previous generation, Samsung ensuring availability for all major retail markets.