Samsung 980 PRO SSD Release Date And Price Ready For PCIe 4.0 At Last

Samsung revealed their next-generation 980 PRO SSD this morning for "advanced applications for gamers and creative professionals." This device is the company's first consumer PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), ever. This Samsung 980 PRO unit is, as Samsung suggests, designed largely in-house. That includes "all the key components" like the custom Elpis controller, DRAM, V-NAND, and other bits too.

This highly-anticipated drive appeared for the first time back in January at CES 2020 – now the lot's here, FINALLY. The Samsung 980 PRO SSD works with potential sequential read and write speeds of 7,000 MB/s and 5,000 MB/s respectively. If you're rolling with random read and write speeds, you're looking at up to 1,000K IOPS.

It's important to note here that Samsung's tests with this card are measured with IOmeter 1.1.0, and that write performance potential was measured with Intelligent TurboWrite tech activated. Samsung suggests that sequential write performance "after Intelligent TurboWrite region" are up to 500 MB/s(250GB), 1,000MB/s(500GB) and 2,000 MB/s(1TB).

It's also important to note that Samsung's test configuration worked with the following components: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor CPU@3.79GHz, DDR4 2666MHz 16GBx2, OS-Windows 10 Pro 64bit, Chipset-ASUS-X570-ROG CROSSHAIR VIII FORMULA.

Storage memory for this new 980 PRO is Samsung 1xx-layer V-NAND 3-bit MLC, and you'll get 1GB LPDDR4 DRAM for the 1TB iteration, 512MB LPDDR4 for 500GB and/or 250GB. You'll roll with AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0, Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667) data encryption, and you'll do well to work with Samsung Magician Software for management of the SSD. Each purchase comes with a five-year limited warranty.

The Samsung 980 PRO comes in three configurations: 1TB, 500GB, and 250GB, each available around the world inside of September, 2020. There'll be a 2TB iteration available "by the end of the year." Suggested pricing starts at approximately $90 for the 250GB version, $150 for 500GB, and $230 for 1TB. We'll know more about the 2TB version soon!