Samsung 980 Pro 1TB Review

Conclusion

It’s been quite a month for us here at OC3D. We’ve only just got over the shock of the game-changing performance from the new Nvidia RTX 3080 and Samsung turn up with a drive which is similarly epoch-making.

For a long time we’ve said that PCI Express 3.0 drives had pretty much topped out, and that whilst we’d buy the Samsung with our own money, if you just wanted performance you could almost buy any of them and be happy. Then the PCI Express 4.0 drives appeared and gave us 5 GB/s read transfer speeds and 4 GB/s write speeds, and made us chuckle at how impressive they were. We thought that was about the upper limit of the PCI Express 4.0 bandwidth as we’d tested four drives and they all gave us approximately identical levels of performance.

Oh we of little faith.

The Samsung 980 Pro has absolutely re-written the rule book. The 128 queue-capable (8 million requests at once, fact fans) 8nm Elpis controller has smashed the OC3D record books, annihilating everything in its path. How fast is it? Well a while ago we ran four Intel 760P drives in RAID0 for one of our Overkill3D features and got 4GB/s out of it. This 980 Pro does 5 GB/s in the same test. Yeah, it’s insane.

What it does mean is that for the third time in a week we have a product which requires absolutely no thinking about, no discussion, no weighing of the good and bad. If you want a drive which is the fastest consumer drive on the planet, and comes with the reassurance that you get from a Samsung product, then the 980 Pro is unquestionably the drive for you. Indeed the only question is whether you have a PCI Express 4.0 motherboard capable of making the most of it. If you haven’t, and won’t for a while, then stick with the 970 Pro.

For everyone who has a PCIe 4.0 motherboard and wants 7 GB/s transfer speeds, the race to buy one whilst they’re in stock starts now… On your marks, get set, go.

  

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