Samsung has announced a new M.2 SSD to take advantage of the new PCIe 4.0 interface. The 980 Pro SSD is Samsung’s first PCIe 4.0-based solid state drive and is targeted towards customers who want a fast performance in their PCs or gaming consoles.
The 980 Pro SSD comes with a custom Elpis controller, V-NAND and DRAM, which Samsung claims are completely designed in-house to get the most out of the PCIe interface. In theoretical terms, 980 PRO delivers a sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,000 MB/s respectively with random read and write speeds of up to 1,000K IOPS. This makes the 980 Pro up to two times faster than PCIe 3.0 SSDs and up to 12.7 times faster than SATA SSDs.
Samsung has also taken care of the heat from the 980 PRO for better performance and reliability. The 980 PRO comes with a nickel coating on the controller as well as a heat spreader label on the backside of the SSD for efficient thermal management. This is complete opposite to other NVMe SSDs that use external copper heatsinks to keep the temperature in check.
The Samsung SSD 980 PRO sells in capacities of 1TB, 500GB and 250GB models and will start selling this month globally. The US pricing starts from $89.99.
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