Samsung has officially listed its next-generation 980 PRO SSDs which come with the PCIe Gen 4.0 interface. The SSDs are aimed at consumer platforms and feature increased transfer speeds and range of features to speed up data on client PCs with faster performance over current-generation SSDs.
Samsung 980 PRO SSDs Bring PCIe Gen 4.0 To Client PCs – Up To 1 TB Storage Capacities
The Samsung 980 PRO SSDs is the successor to the 970 PRO SSD series. The SSDs come in three flavors, a 250 GB model, a 500 GB model, and a 1 TB model. All three drives share similar specs & are fully PCIe Gen 4 compliant.
The drives also come in the standard M.2 2280 form factor and to make full use of these drives, they must be equipped on a PCIe Gen 4 compliant platform such as AMD’s X570 and Intel’s Z490 (with Rocket Lake CPU).
Taking about the design, Samsung’s 980 PRO SSDs will feature a Nickel coated thermal heatsink over the SSD controller while making use of a thin copper film on the back and front of the PCB. Samsung will also utilize its Dynamic Thermal Guard technology to maintain optimal thermal level on its 980 PRO SSDs. The drives make use of the next-gen, custom-designed Elpis Controller and 3-bit MLC (which is a fancy way of saying TLC)
As for specifications, Samsung is touting sequential read and write speeds of up to 7000 MB/s & 5000 MB/s, respectively, for the 1 TB model. The random reads and writes for the drive is rated at 1,000K/1,000K IOPS. The 500 GB model has sequential read and writes speeds of 6,900 MB/s & 5,000 MB/s while the 250 GB model has sequential read and write speeds of 6,400 MB/s and 2,700 MB/s. The random read and write speeds are rated at 800,000 / 1,000,000 IOPS for the 500 GB and 500,000 / 600,000 IOPS for the 250 GB model.
There’s no word on pricing and availability yet but we can expect the prices to be close to what the PCIe Gen 3 based Samsung 970 PRO SSDs currently cost.
