Samsung today unveiled its first consumer PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid state drive (SSD) – the Samsung SSD 980 PRO. The new 980 PRO is designed for professionals and consumers who want cutting-edge performance in their high-end PCs, workstations and game consoles. The new 980 PRO SSD reflects Samsung’s continuing commitment to delivering exceptional products consumers have come to expect from Samsung. The 980 PRO comes in a compact M.2 2280 form factor, which can be easily plugged into desktops and laptops for maximum board design flexibility.
Optimized for handling data-intensive applications, the Samsung 980 PRO is ideal for consumers and professionals who work with 4K and 8K contents, and play graphics-heavy games. All the key components, including the custom Elpis controller, V-NAND and DRAM, are completely designed in-house to deliver the full potential of PCIe 4.0. This allows the 980 PRO to provide sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,000 MB/s respectively, as well as random read and write speeds of up to 1,000K IOPS, making it up to two times faster than PCIe 3.0 SSDs and up to 12.7 times faster than SATA SSDs.
The 980 PRO comes with outstanding thermal control solutions for improved reliability. While most of today’s high-performance NVMe SSDs rely on external copper heatsinks to diffuse heat, Samsung’s 980 PRO employs a nickel coating on the controller as well as a heat spreader label on the back side of the SSD for efficient thermal management. The drive is suitable for building high-performance computing systems due to its optimized power efficiency.
These innovative heat-dissipating functions also allow the drive to maintain its compact and slim M.2 form factor. Samsung’s Dynamic Thermal Guard technology further ensures that the drive’s temperature stays at the optimal level, minimizing performance fluctuations over the long haul. Embedded with Samsung’s cutting-edge thermal control algorithm, the 980 PRO manages heat on its own to deliver durable and reliable performance.
Leveraging the PCIe 4.0 interface, the 980 PRO delivers double the data transfer rate of PCIe 3.0 while being backward compatible for PCIe 3.0 for added versatility. It’s fast at loading games so you can play more and wait less. The Samsung SSD 980 PRO comes in 1TB, 500GB and 250GB models, and will be available worldwide starting this month, while the 2TB capacity model will be available by the end of this year. The 980 PRO’s manufacturer’s suggested retail prices start at $89.99 for the 250GB model.
