Samsung has been one of the frontrunners in the development of high-speed solid state drives for years now, with its 860 Evo and Pro SSDs offering great performance for SATA users, and its 970 drivers arguably the best NVME storage options too — at a price premium. But now it's time to up the ante even more, with the Samsung 980 Pro SSD, an NVMe drive that leverages PCIExpress 4.0 to deliver untold of read and write speeds.
To give you some context for just how fast this drive is, the Samsung 970 Pro SSD, an already very speedy little drive, can perform sequential read speeds at up to 3,500MBps and sequential write speeds at 2,700MBps. The 980 Pro SSD, in the same form factor and physical dimensions, manages a sequential read speed of up to 6,500MBps, and a sequential write speed up to 5,000MBps. That's faster than the quickest Corsair MP600, and quicker than Seagate's Firecuda 520, too.
Random access is exceedingly fast too, and the 4K IOPS are up there with the best NVMe drives available today.
This is made possible thanks to a combination of the PCIe 4.0 interface, and new 2-bit MLC memory. There's also a new version of Samsung's Phoenix controller, according to PCGamesn, but Samsung isn't talking about that yet.
Better yet, we're expecting an Evo version of the 980 drives to be released in the future with nearly comparably specifications, but at a much reduced price. Although the Pro drives haven't been fully costed yet.
Expect these drives later this year in capacities that include 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB.