Samsung 980 PRO with Heatsink PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD 1TB Review

Samsung is one of the biggest names in the business, and while they’re a much larger company that simply makes SSDs, they’re well known in the tech industry for making many of the fastest and most desirable SSDs on the market today. Using their own in-house developed and manufactured hardware, such as their own Samsung V-NAND 3-bit MLC memory and Samsung Controller. This gives them more control over the design than many of their rivals, who rely on 3rd party components to construct their drives, and as we’ve seen in the past, it often gives them a performance edge too. Hopefully, we’ll see a little of that magic in today’s benchmarks.

Samsung 980 PRO with Heatsink

It’s certainly a well-equipped drive. It comes in two variants, one with and one without a heatsink, depending on your needs or placement, you can choose which is best suited to your needs. It runs on the latest PCIe Gen 4.0 x4, NVMe 1.3c interface too, and that means extremely fast performance! It claims to reach (up to) sequential read speeds of 7000 MB/s, and 5000 MB/s sequential write, with 1,000,000 IOPS random read and write (4 KB, DS32). Not sure what all that means? Well, it’s basically one of the fastest consumer drives on the market today. That’s twice the speeds of a Gen3 M.2 SSD, and nearly 13x faster than a 2.5″ SATA SSD. Of course, it comes with a bunch of protection and maintenance features too, which should ensure solid performance throughout the lifespan of the drive. The new SSD is available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB variants.

Features

• PCIe Gen 4.0 x4
• NVMe 1.3c
• Compatible with consoles and PC
• Samsung V-NAND 3-bit MLC
• Samsung Controller
• M.2 2280 Form Factor
• TRIM Support
• Garbage Collection
• S.M.A.R.T.
• AES 256-bit Encryption (Class 0), TCG/Opal, IEEE1667 (Encrypted drive)

For in-depth features and specifications, please visit the official product page here.

What Samsung Had to Say

“Unleash the power of the PCIe® 4.0 NVMe™ SSD 980 PRO for next-level computing. The PCIe® 4.0 delivers 2x the data transfer rate of PCIe® 3.0 while staying backward compatible for total versatility. The added heatsink elevates speed, power efficiency and thermal control to maximise gameplay.

With Samsung’s in-house controller for PCIe® 4.0 SSD, the 980 PRO Series is optimised for speed. It delivers read speeds up to 7,000 MB/s, 2x faster than PCIe® 3.0 SSDs and 12.7x faster than SATA SSDs. The 980 PRO series achieves max speeds on PCIe® 4.0 and may vary in other settings.

Gamers, techies and designers benefit from thermal control, high-performance bandwidth and sustained performance for heavy-duty applications. Games load fast for more play, less wait. Smart heat management reduces distracting noise and cooling fans work for uninterrupted, fully immersive gaming.” – Samsung