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The 980 comes in a small black box. Along with a picture of the drive, the packaging advertises a number of its key features including its 1TB capacity, NVMe interface, maximum read speed and 5 year warranty. Inside, you'll find the SSD as well as a small installation guide and warranty statement.
Physical Features:
The 980 uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 80.15 x 22.15 x 2.38 mm and tips the scales at a mere 8.0g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.
Like Samsung's T7 portable SSD, the 980 uses the company's own "Pablo" controller. Not much is known about this PCIe Gen 3 x4 controller aside from it being DRAM-less and has a nickel coating that helps dissipate heat.
For the 1TB version of the 980, Samsung has used their own 3-bit MLC V-NAND flash chips. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there is a single 1TB NAND flash package on the top of the PCB. There is also no DRAM cache chip as the 980's Pablo controller takes full advantage of NVMe's Host Memory Buffer feature by using a small portion of the computer's memory to cache the mapping tables.
