Despite, well, everything going on in the world right now, 2020 is turning into a geek’s paradise as the year begins to wind down.
Today’s announcement comes from Samsung as it throws the covers off of its latest solid state drive (SSD), the 980 PRO.
We’ll get to the statements, tech and sundry in a second, but what is really important is that Samsung claims a sequential read and write speed of up to 7 000MB/s and 5 000MB/s.
When we saw this a range of expletives our mothers would not be proud to hear ejected themselves from our mouths because that is massive amount of speed.
Who would need that amount of speed? Us.
In all seriousness, drives with performance this fast are best suited for high-demand applications such as video editing where being able to scrub through an 8K timeline could be handled easily by the 980 PRO.
So how did Samsung manage to crack that massive performance boost? In short PCIe 4.0.
The longer answer is that Samsung used a custom Elpis controller, V-NAND and DRAM to create the 980 PRO to take full advantage of the PCIe 4.0 standard.
The 980 PRO will of course work with M.2 slots running on PCIe 3.0.
As The Verge reports, on PCIe 3.0 you can expect sequential read/write speeds from 3 500MB/s and 2 700MB/s respectively.
We’ve included all of the technical specs below.
The Samsung 980 PRO will be available in 1TB, 500GB and 250GB capacities worldwide starting this month with a 2TB capacity reportedly becoming available at the end of the year.
While local pricing and availability is yet to be confirmed, Samsung lists the 250GB capacity with a starting price of $89.99 (~R1 497) so you might want to put some money aside if you want one.
Samsung SSD 980 PRO | |
Interface | PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe 1.3c |
Form Factor | M.2 (2280) |
Storage Memory | Samsung 1xx-layer V-NAND 3-bit MLC |
Controller | Samsung Elpis Controller |
DRAM | 1GB LPDDR4 (1TB) 512MB LPDDR4 (500GB, 250GB) |
Capacity4 | 1TB, 500GB, 250GB |
Sequential Read/Write Speed | Up to 7,000 MB/s, Up to 5,000 MB/s |
Random Read/Write Speed (QD32) |
Up to 1,000K IOPS, 1,000K IOPS |
Management Software | Samsung Magician Software |
Data Encryption | AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0, Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667) |
Total Bytes Written | 600TB (1TB) 300TB (500GB) 150TB (250GB) |
Warranty | Five-year Limited Warranty |