2 TB Samsung 980 Pro Now Available

I agree the 4tb sata drives are tantalizing. I’m going to put newer games on the 980 and my legacy games on a SATA.

I actually run an 840 Evo as my main drive now, that is petty old but was cutting edge at the time. So I want to replace it with something significantly faster since it will likely last several years.

I agree cost per mb is high.
 
Yup. I just cancelled with Samsung and reordered through Amazon. Arrives tonight! Good tip. It had not hit Amazon when I posted.
 
Probably won’t do a damn thing but i need more space for games and wanted something somewhat future proofed.
 
I just ordered one off Amazon too. Should be here on Saturday. It'll run side by side with my Microcenter PCIE4 2tb drive I have in there already but just for games and I'll leave the regular win+apps on the old drive.
 
I'm tempted, but I really wish I'd a 980 EVO drive instead. I'm trying to weigh the costs and performance of 980 PRO against the often on sale 970 EVO Plus, not to mention upcoming Phison E18 controller drives. I have no doubt the 980 Pro is a fantastic drive and I've been served well by Samsung SSDs for years now (pretty much better than all contenders i've found), but I am hoping that the 980 Pro is worth it and wondering why they don't have an EVO to compliment it. Still, for those who know its the drive for them, its nice to see on Amazon and at 2TB. Maybe it will go on sale later!

I'll also have to keep an eye on those 870 EVOs too; the 860 was the best SATA drive you could get pretty much, so an upgrade there is welcome especially if priced right.
 
Pro is great but 99.9999% of tasks and people wont notice any difference in performance from the EVO line at all. Sure you could even blind test that .00001% and most times they could not tell. Unless your doing heavy I/O large file work...
 
I like the Pro's for VMware hosts. I have a 1TB 980 Pro awaiting my new mini PC ESXi box...
 
Pro is great but 99.9999% of tasks and people wont notice any difference in performance from the EVO line at all. Sure you could even blind test that .00001% and most times they could not tell. Unless your doing heavy I/O large file work...

Great point, the reason I am getting it now is because I am the type that does not do CPU / Motherboard upgrade for years. The last time I upgraded was 2014 (4790K) which I am now replacing with 5800x. Given the RTX IO tech from NVDA (similar to where PS5 is going) we may potentially see games utilize this on PC in 2 to 3 years (as its going to be a while till its baked into PC game engines). If they do, I just want to be ready for it - in essence I am paying $150 - $200 extra over slower SSD options for this option. And to put things in perspective you cant even have a good meal at a steakhouse in Manhattan (for two) for this amount - so to me its worth it. For many it may not be.
 
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The 980 Pro is one of the fastest SSDs you can buy right now but I just want to point out this drive does NOT use MLC flash anymore, they switched to TLC. That is probably the main reason that it costs so much less than the old 970 Pro. The write performance of TLC memory is slower than MLC so if you are doing video editing or other write-intensive tasks this new drive might be worse than the old one.
 
The 980 Pro is one of the fastest SSDs you can buy right now but I just want to point out this drive does NOT use MLC flash anymore, they switched to TLC. That is probably the main reason that it costs so much less than the old 970 Pro. The write performance of TLC memory is slower than MLC so if you are doing video editing or other write-intensive tasks this new drive might be worse than the old one.
They should have called it the 980 EVO.
 
In Samsung's defense - it IS cheaper than the 970 Pro...by quite a bit. I'm in it for the warranty and the Samsung controller. The rest of it is fine. No production workloads - so let it ride.
 
They should have called it the 980 EVO.

I can see why they moved to TLC. Most of the budget drives are moving to QLC at this point which is creating a lot of downward pressure on SSD prices. Most people don't know or care what kind of flash the drive uses as long as it works. At the same time, controllers have improved, and drives tend to have much larger DRAM and/or SLC caches than before. I feel that TLC drives are in a much better spot now than when they first entered the market.

I'm glad that since SSDs became mainstream 12+ years ago, it's very rare to ever "wear out" a drive. I hope that continues. Most Intel X25-M drives from 10+ years ago still work. Will most 980 Pro drives still work 10+ years from now? I hope this remains a non-issue, as I really don't want to feel like I'm ruining my drive every time I write something to the drive.

Right now I have a MLC Samsung 960 Pro with ~17TB written and ~14k power-on hours. Showing 97% life remaining. I also have a Samsung PM981a (OEM TLC drive, basically an OEM 970 Evo) that shows 98% remaining after only 3TB written and 2500 power-on hours. Clearly the TLC drive is wearing-out faster. I'm itching for a PCIe 4.0 upgrade to my PCIe 3.0 960 Pro, but I'm not sure if the 980 Pro is really what I'm looking for. I'm not sure if I'd even notice an improvement over my 960 Pro. I suppose waiting for DirectStorage to actually become a thing, and seeing what that does in the real world, would be a good bet.
 
I can see why they moved to TLC. Most of the budget drives are moving to QLC at this point which is creating a lot of downward pressure on SSD prices. Most people don't know or care what kind of flash the drive uses as long as it works. At the same time, controllers have improved, and drives tend to have much larger DRAM and/or SLC caches than before. I feel that TLC drives are in a much better spot now than when they first entered the market.

I'm glad that since SSDs became mainstream 12+ years ago, it's very rare to ever "wear out" a drive. I hope that continues. Most Intel X25-M drives from 10+ years ago still work. Will most 980 Pro drives still work 10+ years from now? I hope this remains a non-issue, as I really don't want to feel like I'm ruining my drive every time I write something to the drive.

Right now I have a MLC Samsung 960 Pro with ~17TB written and ~14k power-on hours. Showing 97% life remaining. I also have a Samsung PM981a (OEM TLC drive, basically an OEM 970 Evo) that shows 98% remaining after only 3TB written and 2500 power-on hours. Clearly the TLC drive is wearing-out faster. I'm itching for a PCIe 4.0 upgrade to my PCIe 3.0 960 Pro, but I'm not sure if the 980 Pro is really what I'm looking for. I'm not sure if I'd even notice an improvement over my 960 Pro. I suppose waiting for DirectStorage to actually become a thing, and seeing what that does in the real world, would be a good bet.
Do you even think you will still be using it 10+ years from now? By then it will probably be obsolete.
 
I expect to still use my 1TB and greater sized SSDs 10 years from now. 256GB and smaller probably will be collecting dust.
 
Do you even think you will still be using it 10+ years from now?

Will I still be using it in my main computer? Probably not. Will I still be using it somewhere? Almost certainly. I don't actually have a single SSD in my spare parts. They've all been passed down to other systems over the years, aside from the few that have failed.

Sandy Bridge (Intel 2500k, etc) launched over 10 years ago at this point, and I know several people who still use those systems, even for gaming. Office systems can see use for 15+ years easily, and even something as simple as Chrome gobbling up all the RAM on an old system can cause excessive pagefile usage and wear on the SSD.
 
All my old SSDs and gaming machines become VMware hypervisor hosts eventually. :)
 
Will I still be using it in my main computer? Probably not. Will I still be using it somewhere? Almost certainly. I don't actually have a single SSD in my spare parts. They've all been passed down to other systems over the years, aside from the few that have failed.

Sandy Bridge (Intel 2500k, etc) launched over 10 years ago at this point, and I know several people who still use those systems, even for gaming. Office systems can see use for 15+ years easily, and even something as simple as Chrome gobbling up all the RAM on an old system can cause excessive pagefile usage and wear on the SSD.
True, but don't you think they will last just fine? I have a 840 pro that will be coming up on 10 years old next year and it's no where near being used up. Been in my main PC as OS drive the entire time so it has seen its fair share of use...
 
I should be getting mine today. I'll see how it does to the Inland I'm currently running from Microcenter.
 
Do we need the PCIe 4 motherboard in order to take advantage of this?

 
Do we need the PCIe 4 motherboard in order to take advantage of this?

Yes and No.
Yes if you want to take advantage of PCIe 4 levels of performance and what the drive is fully capable of.
No if you are OK with having it run @ lessor performance levels with a PCIe 3 MB. (It is backwards compatible.)
 
Do we need the PCIe 4 motherboard in order to take advantage of this?

Your computer will gain the benefits of faster random read and write speeds on a PCIe 3.0 bus with the Samsung 980 Pro. Your computer just will not get the full sequential read and write speeds.
 
True, but don't you think they will last just fine?

I hope so.

I have a 840 pro that will be coming up on 10 years old next year and it's no where near being used up. Been in my main PC as OS drive the entire time so it has seen its fair share of use...

The 840 Pro is a quality MLC drive. MLC has better endurance than TLC. The potential longevity issue with the 980 Pro is that it uses TLC. I believe that my PM981a OEM Samsung SSD uses the same Samsung 3D TLC Flash memory as the 980 Pro, and the drive is clearly wearing out faster than my older MLC-based 960 Pro.
 
I hope so.



The 840 Pro is a quality MLC drive. MLC has better endurance than TLC. The potential longevity issue with the 980 Pro is that it uses TLC. I believe that my PM981a OEM Samsung SSD uses the same Samsung 3D TLC Flash memory as the 980 Pro, and the drive is clearly wearing out faster than my older MLC-based 960 Pro.
Yeah I realize that. But unless TLC wears out a ton quicker I don't think there will be a problem. Then you also can factor in warranty concerns, they only have a 5 year (at most I believe, typically now only 3 years) or so many TBW. Last I looked I was no where near the TBW and to get there I almost assume you need to be doing server type work of some kind.
 
I plugged this drive into my PCIe 3.0 slot. My board is not 4.0 compatible. Even so, the difference is noticeable from SATA. Windows 10 did a clean install in under 10 mins. Steam’s pre-installation work for installing games (allocating space and everything it does before installing) was cut from like 30 seconds to more like 10 seconds. It was like bam bam bam all my games were set. Hit my data cap filling half the (freakin’ comcast) but ok.

After seeing how well it performs with PCIe 3.0, I think the 970 probably is enough, but this is forward looking.
Game load times seem faster but it is nominal. I probably should have got a 970 and waited for a 4tb pcie 4.0 drive to hit and then moved the 970 to the second slot, but I have NO regrets. This is a great drive. Temps are good too.
 
I have been very happy with the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB I purchased. I have it running in a Core i7 10700K system and plan to upgrade the CPU to an 11700K in the near future. I doubt endurance will become an issue before I upgrade from it to a 4TB+ NVMe drive a few years from now. I still have a Samsung 960 Pro 512GB drive as well. I have been debating if I want to use it to setup a tier system with a new 4TB Western Digital Black instead of having the 3.2TB Fusion io-scale. I am one PCIe slot shy of installing all of the adapter cards into the Asus Maximus XIII I purchased recently with the Fusion io-scale drive installed.
 
MLC vs TLC , MLC does not use a SLC cache (all free is effectively like a SLC cache) space is Full speed until you Written full disks work of data in one go, the 980 Pro is just the Evo with a first generation PCI-E 4 samsung controller that second gen other makers are just releasing (and in some cases very large SLC cache)

so file can be 100GB and you can overwrite that file 10 times and it will keep its full write speed until you pass 1TB continuously ,, if you don't let it idle then yes it be forced to do Trim Garbage collection on the fly (only has to be idle for a short time for GC to zero out the empty space again)

i would go with NVME SSD 250gb or 500GB + 1-2TB Sata SSD (more likely 2TB due to game sizes) or 2TB Nvme SSD and 4TB+ spinner
 
Dang that's cheaper than i expected. Tempting but somehow I don't think it's a real life upgrade to the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 I got now.
 
Now that the unit has been reviewed it seems like the WD and Sabrent units are a hair quicker but probably not enough to make a difference for consumer applications.
 
It is sad samsung have moved their TLC drives to MLC pricing and QLC to TLC pricing, I see their 970 evo plus e.g. is almost as much as the MLC 970 pro. Plus the fact both my SSD's with issues are samsing (even if they not caused by the SSD itself) and that samsung has tiny SLC caches, I think I will abandon that brand.
 
I somehow ended up with 2TB, 1TB, and 500GB flavors of this in the past 3 weeks. AMA!
 
Do you want to part with any of them? It seems like you have a lot of unnecessary hardware now. :p
Only the 500GB was a surprise. My first SSD death - my Samsung 850 Pro - within weeks of my 5 year warranty expiring! It's off to Samsung now so I am hoping to get a new 980 replacement. :)

The 1TB and 2TB reside in a new micro VMware hypervisor box that I built on an HP 800 G4 Mini with an 8700K.
 
I have a 2TB 960 Pro here that was $1300 back in 2017! Just updated its FW and the "magician" shows 1.3TB written. Not even broken in! ;-)
The 980 Pro was of little interest to me, a 2TB version maybe. I wonder how it will compare to the Phison E18 PCI-E 4.0 2TB variant which is rumored to be faster.
 
I was considering about getting one but just ordered 2TB 970 Evo Plus instead. It's quite a bit cheaper. I'll just wait for 4TB drive prices to come down (and PCIE 4.0 extra to go away).
 
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