Samsung 980 PRO, the fastest SSD on the market has interesting specifitaions. Samsung continues to strengthen its offer and after the launch of the 870 QVO, now renewals the “Pro” series. Theu will focuse on performance using the NVMe 1.3 interface.
Samsung 980 PRO specs
The drive uses the M.2 format and connects to a PCI-Express 4.0×4 port. The controller is a new batch, a Phison “Elpis” with Samsung‘s own design, while the cache includes an unspecified amount of LPDDR4 DRAM.
The result is spectacular, with data transfers of 7000MB per second in sequential read mode and 5000MB per second in writes. Random reads / writes exceed 1 million 4K IOPS. It will be the fastest that can be mounted on a client machine for internal storage.
As for the NAND flash memories of these Samsung 980 PRO, the manufacturer talks about “Samsung V-NAND 3-bit MLC”. And something does not add up as you will know if you handle these types of formats. The 3 bits per cell design corresponds to TCL and not to the MLC (2 bits per cell) which has been used in previous “Pro” models of Samsung SSDs.
In fact, the use of TLC has an adverse impact on resistance compared to the predecessor the 970 PRO. Samsung only guarantees 600 TBW written for the Samsung 980 PRO with 1TB capacity. Half of the 1,200 TB written offered in the previous model.
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And you know how the market is. Manufacturers are betting on TLC and QLC memory designs (three and four bits per cell), which has allowed increasing density by creating units with higher capacity at a low price, but with disadvantages inherent to their design, reducing the resistance of the cells. of the memory. All this in theory because not enough time has passed to know how long these types of units last.
In any case, they are still high amounts of TB written that most consumers will not reach. In addition, we expect a five-year warranty for these Samsung 980 PRO that are about to hit the market, with several versions depending on storage capacity, at least 256GB, 512GB and the aforementioned 1TB unit.
