Model: Samsung 980 PRO 500GB PCIe 4.0 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.
In 2015, Samsung rocked the industry when it introduced its first consumer-focused NVMe SSD, the 950 PRO. Since then, the company has continued to raise the bar in regards to performance, reliability and capacity. Samsung has now made the jump to PCIe 4.0 with the launch of its latest NVMe SSD, the 980 PRO. Designed for professionals and consumers who want cutting-edge performance in their high-end PCs, workstations and game consoles, this compact, M.2 form factor SSD is powered by Samsung's new "Elpis" controller and is available with up to 2TB of their latest 6th generation V-NAND flash. The 980 PRO also utilizes Samsung's newly enhanced Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 technology along with an ultra-fast PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 1.3c interface to deliver up to 7,000 MB/s read and 5,000 MB/s write speeds and a maximum of 1,000K IOPS for both random read and write operations.
The 980 PRO is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities with a 2TB version to be introduced separately later this year. For this review, Samsung sent us the 500GB version of the drive, which is capable of delivering up to 6,900 MB/s sequential read and 5,000 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 800K random read and 1,000K random write IOPS.
Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the 980 PRO 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 PRO 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.
