Model: Samsung 980 1TB NVMe Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: Samsung Electronics
Provided By: Samsung America
Samsung Electronics has been a leader in the electronics industry for more than 30 years. Since the introduction of their first television in 1970, this Korean company has grown to become one of the world's leading electronics manufacturers, offering everything from tiny semiconductors to large home appliances. Samsung is no stranger to the storage industry either. Along with an assortment of DVD and Blu-ray Disc drives, the company offers both hard drive and flash based storage solutions for the portable and desktop computer markets.
Samsung recently introduced its new 980 series SSDs. In addition to their flagship drive, the 980 PRO, the company has now released its first DRAM-less drive, the 980. Designed for everyday PC users, gamers and content creators, this compact, M.2 form factor SSD is powered by Samsung's "Pablo" controller and is available with up to 1TB of their latest 6th generation V-NAND flash. To overcome the performance drawbacks typically associated with DRAM-less SSDs, the 980 utilizes Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology, which lets the drive use a small portion of the host system's memory as its own. The 980 is also equipped with Samsung's newly upgraded Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 technology as well as an ultra-fast PCIe Gen3 x4 interface to provide NVMe performance with six times the speed of SATA SSDs.
The 980 is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities. For this review, Samsung sent us the 1TB version of the drive, which is capable of delivering up to 3,500 MB/s sequential read and 3,000 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 500K random read and 480K random write IOPS.
Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the 980 has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Samsung's new NVMe SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the 980 have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we've come to expect from Samsung? Keep reading as we find out.
