Samsung has officially introduced its NVMe 980 PRO SSD series, the world’s fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD for consumers. On its Singapore website, Samsung has listed the 1TB, 500GB and 250GB models that promise sequential read speeds of 7,000MB/s, exceeding the 5,000MB/s speeds of today’s other PCIe 4.0 offerings.
Samsung 980 PRO, NVMe SSD announced with reading rates up to 7,000 MB/s
With the 980 PRO SSD, Samsung promises sequential read speeds of 7,000MB/s, sequential write speeds of 5,000MB/s, with random read/write IOPS of up to 1,000K. With the use of TLC flash, the SSD 980 Pro will also have some problems that all TLC SSDs currently have. The first is the size of the write cache, which continuously writes data and reduces speed when the cache is full.
By leveraging the bandwidth provided by PCIe 4.0, Samsung has achieved a performance increase of twice that of current offerings with PCIe 3.0, a true generational leap in the memory performance. It also means a 12.7 times faster leap than SSD SATA.
The Samsung 980 Pro SSD will use the company’s Elpsis controller, use 1 GB of low-power DDR4 memory as a cache and use “Samsung V-NAND MLC 3-bit” memory. In this way, the company would abandon the MLC memory of the 970 EVP SSD.
Please note that the Samsung 980 PRO SSD only reaches its rated speeds when used with PCIe 4.0 compatible systems, such as PCs with an AMD Ryzen 3000 processor and a PCIe 4.0 compatible motherboard.
By the end of the year, Intel is likely to launch the 11th generation of its core desktop platform, Rocket Lake, which could result in an even greater wave of PCIe 4.0 SSD upgrades, but while PCIe 4.0 interfaces can certainly take SSD performance to new heights, this does not necessarily mean that gamers will have a strong demand for upgrades.
At this time, Samsung has not announced the price or release date of its new NVMe SSD.