The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 3 3100 CPU, MSI B550 GAMING PLUS motherboard, 16GB (8GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix 3200 MHz DDR4 memory, Crucial P5 1TB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 10 Pro.
To test the performance of Samsung's 980 PRO SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark. For comparison, I've also included test results from the SK hynix Gold P31, Crucial P5, ADATA SWORDFISH, ADATA FALCON, Lexar NM610, Silicon Power P34A60, Patriot P300, Plextor M9PG Plus, Plextor M9PY Plus, ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro, Western Digital WD Black SN750, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, Crucial P1, ADATA XPG SX8200, Western Digital WD Black NVMe, Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 970 PRO, Plextor M9Pe, Plextor M8Se, Patriot Hellfire, ADATA XPG SX8000, Samsung 960 PRO, Toshiba OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, Samsung 870 QVO, Silicon Power P60, SK hynix Gold S31, ADATA Ultimate SU750, Samsung 860 QVO, Samsung 860 PRO, Crucial MX500, Plextor M8V, Samsung T5, Crucial BX300 and ADATA Ultimate SU900.
As I mentioned earlier, the 980 PRO uses Samsung's new Elpis controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential and random read and write speeds. For this test, we're using the peak and real world profiles.
According to Samsung, the 500GB version of the 980 PRO is capable of reading at 6,900 MB/s and writing at 5,000 MB/s. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that while the drive performed quite well, it came up a bit short of these numbers in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.
As you'd expect, the 980 PRO wasn't nearly as fast when tested with the "real world" profile which uses a single thread and a much lower queue depth. Nevertheless, it was still able to read and write at more than 4,000 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the 980 PRO's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the 980 PRO had average read and write speeds of 2142.6 MB/s and 1105.7 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 2405.0 MB/s. The screenshot also shows the transition from TurboWrite to what Samsung calls "After TurboWrite" speeds. The 980 PRO starts writing at about 2,000 MB/s and then drops to about 800 MB/s when the consecutive write operation exceeds the size of the SLC buffer.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the 980 PRO's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 512B to 54 MB and the total length set to 256MB.
When tested with ATTO, the 980 PRO's read speeds topped out at about 6.4 GB/s and its write speeds at 4.86 GB/s.
