Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB, M.2 2280 / M-Key / PCIe 4.0 x4

The Samsung 980 Pro was the most impressive PCIe Gen4 SSD to hit the market and it now comes in capacities of 2TB. The drive leverages the company’s sixth-generation of VNAND and its latest Elpis controller to bring quoted speeds as high as 7GB/s read and over 1 million IOPS. The 2TB version brings all the benefits of the earlier version with twice the maximum capacity while still all fitting on a single side.

The Samsung 980 PRO series of PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs was introduced in September 2020 and raised the bar for what one can expect from a consumer storage drive. Legit Reviews did a review on the Samsung 980 PRO for the launch and managed to hit speeds of nearly 7 GB/s read and 5 GB/s write. The Samsung 980 PRO was launched with capacities of 250GB, 500GB and 1TB. There was no 2TB capacity drive available and that left many enthusiasts and content creators waiting to see what would come next. That all changed this month as Samsung as introduced a 2TB version of the 980 PRO! This is the largest capacity that you can get their flagship SSD in now and it runs $429.99 or about $0.22 per GB.

There are plenty of positive things about the Samsung 980 Pro, but much of that falls into the category of ‘be careful what you wish for’. On paper, the doubling of bandwidth for M.2 NVMe storage devices looked like slamdunk. But, that thinking failed to consider that the power consumption of this throughput will have a significant thermal impact and that NAND technology isn’t twice the speed this year as it was in 2019. Suppose you occasionally launch applications and write data. In that case, the Samsung 980 Pro will perform admirably, but if you hit it hard repeatedly, the temperature will rise, and without active cooling, it will eventually throttle. There is no free lunch in thermodynamics, with unrelenting use temperatures grow, and eventually, the throughput speeds will be lower than a PCIe 3.0 drive. And, the NAND technology on this drive only looks this fast because it has 1GB of LPDRR4 caching it, but once that and the SLC is fully saturated we see the underlying performance of the Samsung 12-Layer V-NAND 3-bit MLC, and that’s much less. These things said, at least Samsung built a controller for this device that can use most of the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0, where many early PCIe 4.0 NVMe designs opted to use the Phison E16 controller that can only hit 5,000MB/s reading, and 4,800MB/s writes. However, Phison has worked on the E16 and created the E18, a new controller that may eclipse the Samsung Elpis, and has already incorporated it into the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. Hopefully, we’ll review one of those soon to see how it compares. There are scenarios where the Samsung 980 Pro delivers precisely the performance boost that users want, but it isn’t across the board by any means. It’s for you to decide if that fits your use model and to achieve those brief highs, it is worth the extra 80% cost over the Samsung 970 Evo 500GB or similar. Price is a serious issue here, because who in their right mind would buy a 980 Pro 1TB drive from Samsung when the same money might get them 2TB of PCIe 3.0 SSD elsewhere? The Samsung 980 Pro is undoubtedly the PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive by which all others are judged at this moment, but that doesn’t mean we should all rush out and get one, and a system to exploit it. If you do, it's worth avoiding the smaller capacities.

It's been quite a month for us here at OC3D. We've only just got over the shock of the game-changing performance from the new Nvidia RTX 3080 and Samsung turn up with a drive which is similarly epoch-making. For a long time we've said that PCI Express 3.0 drives had pretty much topped out, and that whilst we'd buy the Samsung with our own money, if you just wanted performance you could almost buy any of them and be happy. Then the PCI Express 4.0 drives appeared and gave us 5 GB/s read transfer speeds and 4 GB/s write speeds, and made us chuckle at how impressive they were. We thought that was about the upper limit of the PCI Express 4.0 bandwidth as we'd tested four drives and they all gave us approximately identical levels of performance.

The Samsung 980 PRO series is an impressive drive, however, it managed to impress me less than the release of the 970 PRO. The focus for Samsung has been clear, reach a peak read speed of ~7 GB/sec and ~5 GB/for writes. You'll only hit these numbers in very specific workloads, mostly sustained and linear writes. Also if you want to copy at 5 GB/sec to the Pro, surely your host/client setup should be the same. So you'll be hardpressed to reach these numbers in a real-world scenario. When we look at trace performance and other write workloads, the performance still is terrific, but more in line with a premium PCIe gen 3.0 or 4.0 SSD. That is the reality.