Samsung 980 PRO

erek

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Ready for an upgrade? The 980 Pro could be for you

"Samsung's upcoming flagship client-segment M.2 NVMe SSD, the 980 PRO, has cleared Korean regulators. The drive comes in three capacity variants, led by a 1 TB model (model: MZ-V8P1T0), a 500 GB model (MZ-V8P500), and a 250 GB model (MZ-V8P250). The maximum capacity being rather low at 1 TB suggests that Samsung could stick with MLC (2 bits per cell) NAND flash for the 980 PRO, coupled with an in-house controller that takes advantage of PCI-Express 4.0 x4 host interface to offer sequential transfer rates of up to 6,500 MB/s reads, with up to 5,000 MB/s writes and high random access throughput on account of the MLC NAND flash setup. For higher capacities from Samsung, one should look out for successors of the 970 EVO Plus, which could use 3D TLC NAND flash combined with a similar controller to the 980 PRO, although there's no word on when that drive would launch. The 980 PRO is expected to launch before October."

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https://www.techpowerup.com/269225/samsung-980-pro-clears-korean-regulators-comes-in-three-sizes
 
I've been waiting for Samsung to announce their PCIe 4 NVME drives...but I'll wait for the EVO version...not that it makes a huge difference as far as gaming vs an SSD but it'll be nice to have one (if the price is right)
 
Same here. I bought a 1tb 840 evo 6 years ago. It's not completely full yet; but I wouldn't consider anything smaller than 2tb if I was replacing my system today. Not with some games weighing it at >100gb these days and my goal for my core system (all but GPU) being an 8 year lifespan.
 
Good to hear that they're still most likely using MLC. If they moved to TLC then you may as well get an EVO and save money.
 
I've been waiting for Samsung to announce their PCIe 4 NVME drives...but I'll wait for the EVO version...not that it makes a huge difference as far as gaming vs an SSD but it'll be nice to have one (if the price is right)
These are going to be expensive. I can see the the 1tb being close to $300.
 
Yeah, don't get me wrong I'm sure these drives will be baddass but for my purposes TLC drives are more then sufficient at this point. Maybe I'm just a debbie downer on this.
 
Yeah, don't get me wrong I'm sure these drives will be baddass but for my purposes TLC drives are more then sufficient at this point. Maybe I'm just a debbie downer on this.
TLC has gotten a lot better with newer technology as far as durability and performance goes. I still would not touch a QLC drive with a 10-metre cattle prod, though.
 
I almost went with Pro parts in my last build and then decided....."you really going to move your steam library around that much that you need it done in a few minutes versus....a few more minutes?" and the answer was...No. We're already at stupid fast. As file sizes grow cache expansion and performance must scale as well but the jump from HDD to SSD was so epic that now these advances really kinda register as "That's nice but...I'm good". If money is no object, different story, but then again that applies to everything.
 
I would purely as a replacement for HDDs depending on the purpose. I would gladly use a 3/4TB qlc drive in a NAS or for a Steam drive.

Agreed. If we get QLC drives with attractive prices I'll have no problem replacing my games drive with one. In fact, I'm sitting here on the sidelines waiting for it.
 
I almost went with Pro parts in my last build and then decided....."you really going to move your steam library around that much that you need it done in a few minutes versus....a few more minutes?" and the answer was...No. We're already at stupid fast. As file sizes grow cache expansion and performance must scale as well but the jump from HDD to SSD was so epic that now these advances really kinda register as "That's nice but...I'm good". If money is no object, different story, but then again that applies to everything.

I hear ya. I'm still on 2.5" SATA SSDs and have zero regrets about NOT having any PCIe-based NVMe drives, based on real-world OS and game load times comparisons.
It just doesn't make sense *for me* to spend 2-3x the price/capacity to get a NVMe in the same capacity of a 2.5" SATA when the only advantage I'll actually see about is 0-5 seconds load times difference with my day-to-day usage.

Maybe when PCIe 5.0 drives emerge...
*shrug*
 
I am waiting to see what Adata XPG sage delivers, hope they have 2tb capacity as this is what I am planning to use as minimum in my new build. XPG Sage, an upcoming PCIe Gen 4 SSD that promises read and write speeds of over 7,000 and 6,000 MBps, along with 1 million / 800K IOPS read and writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/amp/news/adata-sage-ssd-unveiled
 
Agreed. If we get QLC drives with attractive prices I'll have no problem replacing my games drive with one. In fact, I'm sitting here on the sidelines waiting for it.
I have one 2TB Intel 660p in my gaming desktop dedicated for that purpose; I expect it will have no problem handling consumer available download speeds well after the point it is replaced for something larger.

I have another 2TB Intel 660p in my ultrabook, primarily because it was the only way to get 2TB single-sided such that it would actually fit. No problem there either.
 
The marketing is like this we take away your sata ports you need to buy M.2 drives instead in small capacity so you keep coming back for more.
Since the drive bays have already exited stage left... more or less?

Generally end-users don't have a significant need for local storage; games are about the only thing that a) requires a bit of space and b) requires low-latency access. Exceptions that do need local storage usually venture into 'workstation' categories and HEDT platforms being recommended.

On the other side, higher-capacity NVMe has to be right around the corner. 4TB TLC and 8TB QLC drives exist today, from consumer-oriented brands, they're just priced disproportionately high.
 
Part of me wants to upgrade from my 960 Pro so that I can take advantage of PCIe 4.0, but realistically I don't think my 960 Pro is a bottleneck in anything I do yet.

Me too.

X570 here with all SATA SSDs.. my board is bored. I'm fine though.
 
My new supermicro’s are using Samsung pro’s only need 256gb all it runs is the OS, the VM’s live on dedicated arrays. Laptops run 128 or 256 all the data lives on a Terrastation that backs up to SharePoint online. Local storage for the most part doesn’t need to be that big, I would rather a 1TB with good redundancy than a 2 with none.
 
My NVME is on a PCIe 2 daughter board... I think, but i'm still first to load the map each round. I keep my big steam library on an HDD, my active games on an NVME and my system on a big SSD.

Keeping my x570 slots open for these next gen nvmes.
 
This is nice to see, but I'm interested in the EVO version which has historically offered the vast majority of the performance and reliability at a much lower cost. Getting an 980 EVO Plus or whatever, set up on PCI-E 4.0, would be a nice step forward and its good to see Samsung finally making PCI 4.0 supported hardware.
 
Too bad no plans for a 2tb pro, the 960 pro 2tb was a nice (if expensive) option when it was new.
 
I am waiting to see what Adata XPG sage delivers, hope they have 2tb capacity as this is what I am planning to use as minimum in my new build. XPG Sage, an upcoming PCIe Gen 4 SSD that promises read and write speeds of over 7,000 and 6,000 MBps, along with 1 million / 800K IOPS read and writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/amp/news/adata-sage-ssd-unveiled



Anandtech said the TLC based Sage will launch with 2 and 4 Terabyte m.2 models at launch.
 
Get 4K reads up to 3D XPoint levels, then I'll be impressed.
Unfortunately, they're mostly going in the opposite direction; I still want an Optane boot drive, though!

My NVME is on a PCIe 2 daughter board... I think, but i'm still first to load the map each round.
I'm almost always first too, using a QLC NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD. Though I expect most here would be as well.

Really the protocol overhead trimming that happened from SATA to NVMe is far more important than the actual bandwidth boost when it comes to application responsiveness.
 
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It's true to say that only random read/writes matter, right?

I mean that in context of current era speeds. Assuming 4000+ MB/s seq speeds, only random speeds are still slow and primitive.
 
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It's true to say that only random read/writes matter, right?

I mean that in context of current era speeds. Assuming 4000+ MB/s seq speeds, only random speeds are still slow and primitive.
When speaking in terms of user desktop experience, pretty much. In these cases it's a matter of how quickly new data can be found, or how data from many different streams with many different destinations can be recorded.

Obviously the sequential speeds still matter for workloads that are comprised in part of significant contiguous blocks of data, but when you consider that we're seeing >4.0GB/s of sequential read performance and your average consumer desktop likely tops out at 32GB of RAM, the utility of even more sequential read performance is fairly limited. Now, if you're building a workstation with dozens of cores and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM...
 
Unfortunately, they're mostly going in the opposite direction; I still want an Optane boot drive, though!


I'm almost always first too, using a QLC NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD. Though I expect most here would be as well.

Really the protocol overhead trimming that happened from SATA to NVMe is far more important than the actual bandwidth boost when it comes to application responsiveness.

I read rumors that Intel is supposed to finally release 2nd gen optane SSDs, which are supposed to be pcie 4. I'd love to pick one up for a boot drive as well.
 
Nothing on price and no 2+TB Option. I guess it's expected that it will cost a ridiculous amount.
 
I read rumors that Intel is supposed to finally release 2nd gen optane SSDs, which are supposed to be pcie 4. I'd love to pick one up for a boot drive as well.
Be nice if that a) they got capacities up a little and b) they perhaps separated it into performance tiers (like Samsung's 'Pro' and 'Evo'), such that much of the benefit of the technology might be more broadly felt. A ~500GB M.2 model would go nicely with a 4TB QLC SSD for nearly all desktop use, especially if they got the minimum transfer rates of the QLC up a bit too.
 
Samsung today released the official specs for the 980 Pro- Samsung quotes up to 7,000MB/sec sequential reads and up to 5,000MB/sec sequential writes for the 1TB version of the 980 Pro...Random 4K reads and writes (4KB, QD32) are listed at 1,000,000 IOPS...Samsung is using a nickel coating on the SSD's controller to keep heat in check, while the SSD's label also serves as a heat spreader...

https://hothardware.com/news/samsung-980-pro-pcie-40-ssd-7gbsec-reads
 
If it holds up, why not?

MLC was once reviled next to SLC.
Part of the fun w.r.t. the 970 Pro wasn't write endurance - though Samsung did warranty the 1TB model to 1200TBW, which is double what Samsung does for the 1TB EVO, 1TB EVO Plus, and the new 1TB 980 Pro (apparently). It was the other write endurance rating that distinguished it. Existing TLC NAND is generally slow enough that its high performance relies on a SLC cache (even more true for QLC). Samsung's 970 Pro used MLC that was fast enough to not need a SLC cache at all, so all operations were done directly in MLC. This meant there was no SLC cache to exhaust. If you were a customer that would meaningfully benefit from that, then this was an interesting choice on the market.

It's not as if Samsung doesn't already have higher performing TLC products on the market (970 Evo and the Evo Plus regularly benched around the 970 Pro, as did practically all other high end NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSDs on the market).

So the only, and I mean ONLY, selling point of the 970 Pro was its endurance (both endurance types). Without it, why even bother with a 970 Pro? Unless if the 980 Evo is being gimped in some other way (e.g. fewer PCie 4.0 lanes, fewer channels, PCIe 3.0-only, etc, etc) or a 980 Evo isn't coming to market, I don't quite see how the 980 Pro fits into Samsung's product stack with TLC. Of course, there is the extremely, tiny, remote possibility that the 980 Pro is natively doing everything in TLC, and the new 6th gen V-NAND TLC is fast enough to saturate 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0... but I doubt it, given the peak marketing 6th gen 3D V-NAND speed given is around where the previous generation was, too.


EDIT: image from a Tweaktown review to showcase that:

Some of these drives, that were otherwise getting nice benchmark ratings, would ultimately be half as quick as the 970 Pro was in massive sequential file transfer. If you weren't in that market (or didn't need the performance benefit), then sure, it's basically a wasted performance advantage. The remaining difference would come down to Samsung giving their 1TB 970 Pro a 1200TBW warranty.
 

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