Samsung SSD 980 PRO 250GB, M.2 2280 / M-Key / PCIe 4.0 x4

Needless to say PCIe 3.0 SSD is basically ubiquitous thanks to the affordable price, transfer speed, and responsiveness that is more than enough for daily usage. With that in mind and plenty of choices and selections in the market, how does one justify the need for a PCIe 4.0 SSD - let alone the premium ones with their high price tag? Today, we'll bring your attention to the Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD that we have here.

There are plenty of positive things about the Samsung 980 Pro, but much of that falls into the category of ‘be careful what you wish for’. On paper, the doubling of bandwidth for M.2 NVMe storage devices looked like slamdunk. But, that thinking failed to consider that the power consumption of this throughput will have a significant thermal impact and that NAND technology isn’t twice the speed this year as it was in 2019. Suppose you occasionally launch applications and write data. In that case, the Samsung 980 Pro will perform admirably, but if you hit it hard repeatedly, the temperature will rise, and without active cooling, it will eventually throttle. There is no free lunch in thermodynamics, with unrelenting use temperatures grow, and eventually, the throughput speeds will be lower than a PCIe 3.0 drive. And, the NAND technology on this drive only looks this fast because it has 1GB of LPDRR4 caching it, but once that and the SLC is fully saturated we see the underlying performance of the Samsung 12-Layer V-NAND 3-bit MLC, and that’s much less. These things said, at least Samsung built a controller for this device that can use most of the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0, where many early PCIe 4.0 NVMe designs opted to use the Phison E16 controller that can only hit 5,000MB/s reading, and 4,800MB/s writes. However, Phison has worked on the E16 and created the E18, a new controller that may eclipse the Samsung Elpis, and has already incorporated it into the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. Hopefully, we’ll review one of those soon to see how it compares. There are scenarios where the Samsung 980 Pro delivers precisely the performance boost that users want, but it isn’t across the board by any means. It’s for you to decide if that fits your use model and to achieve those brief highs, it is worth the extra 80% cost over the Samsung 970 Evo 500GB or similar. Price is a serious issue here, because who in their right mind would buy a 980 Pro 1TB drive from Samsung when the same money might get them 2TB of PCIe 3.0 SSD elsewhere? The Samsung 980 Pro is undoubtedly the PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive by which all others are judged at this moment, but that doesn’t mean we should all rush out and get one, and a system to exploit it. If you do, it's worth avoiding the smaller capacities.