Samsung announced the latest SSD, the successor to the 970 Evo, called the 980. The drive is an NVMe M.2 PCIe 3.0 drive, which is also affordable. It costs a bit, up to $129.99 for the 1TB version, up to $49.99 for the 250GB model.
There is a reason for the low price. This is Samsung’s first NVMe SSD without DRAM, a cost saving indicator that many other storage manufacturers have already achieved varying degrees of success. The 980 doesn’t have the high-speed dynamic RAM, which is usually used to map the contents of an SSD, which helps deliver data quickly and efficiently.
However, despite this feature being removed, Samsung still offers impressive performance over other non-DRAM options as this drive utilizes the NVMe spec’s host memory buffer feature. For Samsung, up to 64MB of CPU RAM is clicked through PCIe to capture free space instead of SSD. As a result, it’s not as fast as an SSD with DRAM, but its host memory buffer capability helps to outperform far better than models that are completely lacking and can save money. Samsung says this SSD can achieve speeds up to 6 times faster than SATA-based SSDs.
Samsung’s smart TurboWrite 2.0 feature also delivers this high speed, doubling the maximum dedicated buffer area from 42GB on the 970 Evo to 980GB to 160GB. This feature mimics the 980’s high-speed SLC (Single Layer Cell) performance despite the fact that it uses 3 bits of 3-bit Multilayer Cell (MLC) memory and aims to deliver sustainable performance while transferring large files.
Samsung claims that the 1TB version of the 980 can deliver up to 3500MB/s sequential read and 3000MB/s write speed, which is roughly equivalent to the speed (and more expensive) of the 970 Evo Plus SSD, and the higher serial 970 Evo Excel. Writing speed. It’s far from Samsung’s 980 Pro, but when connected to a PCIe 4.0 capable motherboard, it offers sequential read and write speeds of 7000MB/s and 5000MB/s respectively.
As usual, the lower the capacity, the sharper the performance drops. For example, the low-end 250GB model requires a sequential read speed of 2,900MB/s and a sequential write speed of 1,300MB/s. Another notable feature here is that even without DRAM, Samsung claims that I/O and random read speeds during intensive operations are similar to the 970 Evo and not far from the 970 Evo Plus.
So, even while deleting components that help the SSD run fast, Samsung’s 980 still looks very fast. If you’re curious, Samsung’s test system that met these benchmarks is powered by an Intel Core i7-6700K processor, a Ryzen 7 3700X and 8GB of DDR4 2133MHz RAM.
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