Given how fast the TLC was when the SLC cache was exhausted (and was undoubtedly working on flushing the SLC cache into TLC), I wonder how much faster the native TLC mode of the SSD could be?
Their ISSCC 2019 presentation about the 512Gbit 128L die (which will be used in the 2TB 980 PRO) claims a write speed of 82MB/s per die. The 1TB 980 PRO is using a total of 32 of the 256Gbit dies, and if it's the same speed then that would work out to 2624 MB/s. So that suggests the total drive fill process is barely slowed down at all by the SLC caching dance, and a datacenter drive using this NAND and controller could hit almost twice the write throughput the current 960GB 983 DCT is rated for.
Why don't you test a fully filled SSD performance anymore like you used to in AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy? An empty 980 pro drive performance is not what its target consumer wants to know.
Not quite. The P31 is an amazing value, but I have yet to find a lower latency drive than a Samsung. The P31 does nip at the heels and even surprises in some tests, but it still falls massively short in many latency-sensitive situations where it is easily outclassed by the 970 EVO Plus and above. You get what you pay for.
For laptop usage that latency is not even close to worth it. I'm optimistic the upgrade from a 970 EVO (don't worry, it's primarily for a capacity upgrade) will help my inefficient Ryzen 2700U hold on a bit longer when off the charger.
The P31 performs admirably and does so while consuming very little power and producing very little heat. It doesn't trounce the Samsung drives in every metric but at that price and power budget it doesn't have to.
If Hynix wanted to crank up the heat and power consumption, there is nothing stopping them operating the controller at a higher frequency to reduce the latency caused by processing overhead.
But they realize there is no need for this at the moment as they have a product that is class-leading in a class it doesn't even compete in.
That is why TODAY I just received my 1TB 970 Pro for my laptop. Even choosing it over the 980's... it was the Avg write latency table that sealed the deal for me. (See ATSB Heavy / Write)
My Toshiba X5GP 2TB (supposedly enterprise class ssd) is not able to keep up with the huge writes my system endures most days. My write performance drops by about 10x, and when I replay my data, there are clear drop-outs.
The loss of capacity will be a pain, but I'll push old data to the 2TB, as reads on that disk are normal, and if I need to work on a data set, I'll just have to pull it across to the 970 Pro again.
What this review has done for me is to whet my appetite for an Optane drive. I'm looking forward to seeing how the new AlderStream Optane drives perform!
Right here with you. Goodbye Samsung, nice knowing you. Will advise all my clients to stay away form Samsung for mission critical storage. Wish we had a choice of selecting SLC, MLC, TLC, trading capacity for reliability, if desired.
For the sake of your clients, please advice them to use enterprise drives for mission critical storage. Those Qvos, Evos and Pros are just client storage drives and not meant for anything critical. and of course you can limit the drives capacity to lesser value in order to gain some spare endurance. For example quote 384GB on 512GB drive will definitely double your endurance.
"please advice them to use enterprise drives for mission critical storage."
does anyone, besides me of course, remember when STEC made 'the best enterprise' SSD? anybody even know about STEC? or any of the other niche 'enterprise' SSD vendors?
It's almost like my comment on the previous article about the anandtech bench showing the 970 Pro is still faster due to the move to TLC were accurate.
On the random, when the 980 beats the 970 pro it's by the smallest margin.
Samsung has really let the professionals like myself that bought pro series drives exclusively down.
Not to mention over 2 years later than the 970 Pro and it's marginally faster sometimes outside raw burst sequential read/write.
And the consoles only have hardware compression to get the most out of their CPUs, same for their audio hardware, video decoders, and hardware scalers.
There's plenty of efficient software compression techniques, Windows 10 even added new ones that can be applied at the filesystem level. They have good compression, and very little overhead to decompress in real time. Only downside is that it's a windows 10 feature, that means it's half baked. Setting the compression flag is ignored by windows, you have to compress manually every time.
Traditional lossy texture compression is closer to throwing data out at a fixed ratio than it is compression in the lossless sense. Compressed textures don't get compressed so much as texture units interpolate the missing data on the fly.
This is opposed to lossless compression, which is closer to ZIP file compression. No data is lost, but it has to be explicitly unpacked/decompressed before it can be used. Certain lossless algorithms work on compressed textures, so games store texture data with lossless compression to further keep the game install sizes down. The trade-off being that all of this data then needs uncompressed before the GPU can work on it, and that is a job traditionally done by the CPU.
This fast of a drive combined with DirectStorage has me very excited for this particular reason. Though, as I understand it, DirectStorage requires the game to explicitly call the API and thus needs to be built into the game, as opposed to a passive boost to every game.
Yep. I find the raw sequential speeds exciting too - its not just about IOPS :)
This processor load balancing coincides w/ some very handy advances in mainstream system memory - typically? 64GB (2x 32GB 3200 cl16 ~$220 atm) w/ speeds to ~45-50GB/s on AM4?,
a PCIE 4 GPU w/ a 32GB/s link vs the former 16GB/s. Its little mentioned, but seems an important plateau - ~64GB at 32GB/s seems a pretty usable supplemental tier of cache for the gpu?
quite possibly, nvme ports on the GPU's Infinity Fabric bus on ~BigNavi to bypass a potentially bottlenecked pcie bus - AMD did it before with a pro Vega card - an nvme raid array on the gpu.
individually they are increments in currently usable gaming memory & bandwidth (if not IOPS), but collectively they could be a force which affects gaming?
Games are what they are due to the restrictions of yore. Of course they are coded to isolate within gpu resources.. it was the only way to run fast enough. Reduce the restrictions tho, & add new usable resources, & games change to provide new & richer experiences.
MS FS is perhaps a forerunner of this new mindset - it likes massive memory, but is fun at 30FPS.
Thanks for the comparison to the PM1725a, I didn't realize how the lack of an SLC cache hurt it so much! I got a used 3.2 TB 'b version for a song, still holding out on Haswell here and probably won't upgrade until next year (Zen 3 may convince me otherwise). Looking forward to Phison's updated controllers and 2TB+ drives next year. Definitely don't need to waste money on the Pro line anymore.
I was actually surprised how poorly the PM1725a fared on the consumer tests. I knew that the lack of SLC caching would hurt its writes, but it also appears to be heavily optimized for high queue depths at the expense of low queue depth performance.
I'm planning to have some overlap between the enterprise and consumer synthetic benchmarks going forward, so there should be more opportunities to notice stuff like this.
Time constraints, mostly. I grabbed the PM1725a because of its potential to show similar peak throughput, and it takes less than two hours to run the synthetic tests. A full set of ATSB results is a minimum of 12 hours plus however long it takes to fill the drive twice.
Couldn't you do it during downtime and then lump the results directly into bench? I'm not particularly fussed about having the results in this particular review, but they would be very nice to have around eventually™ for weirdos like me who buy used server drives for cheap and stick em into the desktop.
The Rocket 4 Plus was already announced and should be shipping this year with what looks to be better performance than this. Will be interesting to see what the price will be. The E18 also supports NVMe 1.4 rather than 1.3c on the 980 Pro.
Why wouldn't I get a, different, 2TB drive for the same price as the 1TB 980 Pro when the performance difference is negligible even in synthetic loads?
Its also cheaper, more like a 970 EVO replacement. Thinking of it that way, its a nice bump to replace my EVO. They really shouldn't have called it Pro though.
None of these metrics are really relevant in day-to-day usage. In that respect, you won't really notice the difference between any of these and a decent SATA drive.
It absolutely is. In fact, Optane is even better. The vast majority of people spend their time doing low queue depth random read and write. It IS noticeable unless you ONLY use your PC for Gmail and Facebook.
It does seem rather overpriced. Something like the ADATA SX8200 PRO 1TB which is a perfectly fine fast drive hovers around half the price of this. The ADATA drive is slightly worse performing but it’s still a bloody fast NVMe drive and the difference is near undetectable to the user.
Other drives are also cheaper and give sustained performance under full disk write (which the ADATA doesn’t, but if you regularly write 900GB in one go to your NVME drive you have special requirements.)
Updating my comment - StorageReview tested the 980 Pro with enterprise workloads. It seems a fantastic performer there, with some of the highest numbers I’ve ever seen, especially in random 4K r/w, which is an area I’ve long felt nvme was neglecting. The 980 Pro is a drive that finally performs well in this area.
That said, that performance requires a monster 128 queue depth which is fine in enterprise but is very rarely seen in desktop computing. Oh well, it’s called Pro for a reason. That aspect of its performance justifies the price in my view.
Why haven't you tested any Phison E16 drives yet? I get that power consumption was seen as an issue, but with these drives pulling 20 watts, I don't think Phison E16 drives would be all that different. That said, the only way to validate any of those claims is by actually testing the drives. Which you haven't done yet.
An extreme endurance drive (all SLC) would seem to be a useful niche product for some users. It should be possible to produce such a drive with just a software modification to the controller. Obviously the cost/GB would be much higher but for some uses the extra cost would be worth it. (The same amount of NAND that would provide 2TB in TLC mode would only provide around 600GB in SLC mode.)
"(The same amount of NAND that would provide 2TB in TLC mode would only provide around 600GB in SLC mode.)"
if memory serves, at least one of the AT SSD reviewers has pointed out that TLC/QLC NAND run in 'SLC mode' isn't actually SLC. and doesn't perform like it.
With the move to 128l 8nm NAND, I was hoping for MLC with higher capacity, faster performance and lower prices at the same endurance level of the 970 Pro.
But with TLC, this is still significantly more expensive than the EVO Plus, and not worth it for the average consumer considering the competition. It's just making Hynix Gold look that much better. This isn't what the Pro series customers wanted, Samsung...
What's the point of these if they are going to use TLC? They already make TLC SSDs and the market is pretty full.
So what if using MLC is more expensive? Isn't the whole point of these to be their best of the best? And if an SLC cache benefits TLC SSDs, then why not have an MLC SSD with an SLC cache?
You mean it will just use the entire empty SSD, because leaving the SSD empty is both a 'feature' and a smart use case? I barely even have 10% free on actively used SSDs.
For $20 more, I'll take a slight performance hit, but gain 4X the endurance by buying a 512GB 970 Pro. There's been nothing worth upgrading to since the 950 Pro when it comes to real world usage anyway though.
While the article is painfully incomplete, its 3.0 performance is a bit of a moot point. I’m particularly waiting for the 4.0 test results as that’s what will count here.
Hell anandtech, i am badly missing the comparison to the modern M2- PCI 4.0 SSD with Toshiba Nanad and Phison E-16 controller. So either the Corsair MP600 or the Gigabyte Aorus. Other websites did the comparison in their Test, and Samsung hit the floor. Are you trying to protect Samsung by avoiding the big competitors?
"Hype for the upcoming generation of game consoles has suggested that future video games may reach the point of needing the equivalent of an entire CPU core to manage IO, but that's only after using the equivalent of several more cores to decompress data and feed it to a powerful GPU running the kind of game engine that doesn't exist yet. Our new benchmark suite will be designed with such workloads in mind, but current consumer workloads aren't there yet and won't be for at least a few years." Major developers have had access to new consoles for some time already. I would not be surprised to see it used next year in some technologically ambitious game, or even in Cyberpunk 2077.
On the PC side, it's basically predicated on Microsoft incorporating final Directstorage API support into a Windows update, which likely won't happen until the middle of next year.
Likely not untrue, but it isn't solely in the hands of Microsoft. Developers will still be able to leverage RTXIO, however, as we've seen with many other NVIDIA technologies there are a few games that will take advantage and the bulk will stick to less proprietary technologies. As such I think we will likely only see RTXIO leveraged via DirectStorage for games that are developed cross platform for Xbox Series X|S and Windows 10 PC.
Yeah, we may get a few early test case scenarios through an Nvidia demonstration or partner product, but any major release will probably wait to land concurrently with a full fat Directstorage update from Microsoft. I'm looking forward to it, as I've got a pretty fast storage subsystem and very few games take advantage of it even during asset loading.
Do we know enough about the new DirectStorage API to make a prediction about how this will perform against the 4.0 Phison controller next year? Seems like that will be a real world situation that will use lots more queues and shift performance towards the Samsung.
This product release is a real yawner. I am keeping my 970 Pro's, and will be searching anywhere but Samsung for decent TLC's with Hardware Encryption capability when I need another. Depending on platform, software Bitlocker may not slow the drive down much, or might do so a lot. For laptops, the real problem is the extra CPU power for software encryption that exceeds differences in SSD power among the SSD drives. Yeah, hardware bitlocker has its issues, but it seems the most power efficient option for laptops that need bitlocker. Meanwhile for non-hardware encrypted drives, the SK Hynix P31 looks very good, runs with the PCI4 drives in many aspects,, and has a great price.
Which Phision controller are you referencing? They have multiple PCIe 4.0 controllers and most of them are already available. The E16T has been available in multiple products since early in the year and the E18 is the controller for the recently announced Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus which (on paper) looks to offer better performance than the 980 Pro. The Rocket 4 Plus looks like it should also be available this year and there are a couple of other drives that are expected to launch in Q4 that will also likely be using the E18
I'm confused by the conclusion claiming it regains the performance crown, but the results seem to show it beaten quite often, even by the 970 pro and 970 evo plus in some cases. What am I missing?
You're not missing anything, this is just corporate ass-wiping to reward Samsung for their terrible marketing decision to devalue the Pro brand they've been creating for a decade.
That is some trash endurance for the price. The performance numbers are okay, but not the slightest bit earth shattering. I guess in the grand scheme of things, there appears to be no really good reason for this drive to even have gone into production for as little as it brings to the table. At least it isn't QLC, but it's pretty obvious that we have reached the end of NAND and need a more durable and higher density storage medium for the solid state side of the equation.
NAND has a long way to go yet. It took a while for SATA SSDs to take off then they were bumping at the top of the SATA bandwidth for many years. Now the PCIe NVME drives are shooting up in data transfer speeds faster than the PCIe committee can bring out new speeds. NVME drives were all clustered at the top of PCIe 3.0 for a few years; PCIe 4.0 has only just come out and already much of the new headroom has gone. At this point the main bottlenecks are the drive controller chips and the PCIe standards themselves. 5.0 is being rushed out for a reason and it isn’t for GPU cards.
Modern SSD's endurance being small is mostly a myth. The last test I saw was on a Crucial BX500 120GB and it wrote 1.2PB on it before it gave out while a smaller 32GB hit around 250TB. The amount of voltage hitting the cells has dropped significantly over the years when they switched to Charged Trap Flash.
The most recent SMART log for the 1TB 980 PRO indicates that it has spent about two minutes at or above the warning temperature (82C) but hasn't hit the critical temperature (85C). And that's out of about 14 power-on hours of testing. The SMART logs for the 250GB drive indicate that it has not hit its warning temperature.
What's the cells endurance and storage data stability compared at DWPD=0.3 on these high temperatures (179F, 82C) with long term comparison? What to expect on 5 year professional (high throughput) usage patterns?
“Samsung is abandoning the use of the two bit per cell (MLC) memory that has been the hallmark of the PRO product lines, and with the 980 PRO, Samsung is finally switching to three bit per cell (TLC) NAND flash memory.
Along with switching to TLC NAND, Samsung has cut the write endurance ratings in half to 0.3 DWPD and dropped the usable capacities down to the typical TLC/EVO levels of 250/500/1000 GB instead of 256/512/1024 GB. TLC means the 980 PRO now relies on SLC caching for its peak write speeds, and write performance will drop substantially if the SLC cache is ever filled.”
Finally!
What consumers hope for: Worse endurance and worse performance. Higher profits for the company selling it.
"Pro" means precisely and exactly, absolutely 0% of sod all. And always has. Either a product fits ones particular use case or it does not. I'm a "pro", in that I design, integrate an build Telco grade data centre systems deployments. I don't have a use for 600TBW to a 1TB drive, I'll never write that in it's useful life. I don't have a use for 6GB/s transfer rates. I do have a use for multiterabyte ssds at reasonable (1GB/s) transfer rates. For me, that would be a "pro" drive. For other workloads an entirely different "pro" profile is needed. There are few blanket use cases, except perhaps standard consumer laptop drives.
"'Pro' means precisely and exactly, absolutely 0% of sod all."
You're correct and you're incorrect.
You're correct in the sense that Samsung has rendered "Pro" no longer compelling by selling inferior TLC NAND in this product, undermining the established reputation of its Pro-labeled product line.
You're incorrect in terms of this:
"And always has."
This is objectively flatly false. Samsung's Pro-labeled products have existed in the market for quite some time. They have an established reputation for targeting a specific level of performance and having other characteristics, like high-endurance MLC NAND.
"In 4K write activity, the Samsung 980 Pro was ahead by a mile with a peak performance of 383,099 IOPS and a latency of 329.1ms. The next best drive only reached 144K IOPS and almost 900ms in latency."
"The Samsung SSD 980 Pro is the best-performing consumer drive we’ve tested to date, it more than doubled the numbers of its competitors in some areas. "
Samsung seems to be hoping it can rely on the Pro branding to get people to buy TLC without knowing it. The article mentions that other companies have dropped MLC so Samsung may be betting on two things:
1. It will be possible to coast for a bit on the Pro name, before enough people catch on. So, a bit of extra money can be made via the legacy of MLC.
2. By the time consumers catch on they won't be so mad because of the power of the "everyone else is doing it" fallacy.
Sabrent Rock 4 Plus is going to be my next drive. No more MLC = No more Samsung tax and not worth buying this at all, those have even higher TBW and more SLC caching than this garbage overpriced product with false PRO tag.
Could the comparison include some of the fastest M.2 SSDs already in market, e.g. Sabrent Rocket 4, Corsair MP600, Aorus NVM, etc.? the comparison drives used in this article are not the fastest ones, so it is difficult to understand how good is this M.2 drive vs all the other top ones in the market already. Thank you!
I'd also like to see a few more models make their way through the Anandtech tests, but the Seagate Firecuda 520 in this review is essentially representative of the models you listed. They're all based on what are effectively reference Phison E16 designs and can even be cross-flashed with the same firmware. Upcoming Phison E18 based drives should shake things up a little bit more and will be the true point of comparison for the 980 Pro.
The write endurance on this drive is identical to the 970 EVO. Yeah, it may be a bit faster - especially being PCIE 4.0 - but it's not like you can use it in ways that you can't use the (much cheaper) non-Pro drives now.
And you are entirely missing the point. "Pro" is a generic, meaningless, marketing term. Just look on Amazon for "pro" branded items, ranging from cheap tat to quality (for specific use cases) items. You are choosing to interpret the way a marketing/branding term has previously been applied to product by a manufacturer as having a fixed value and meaning which it does not, it is merely branding and ascribes no specific technical, functional or physical properties to the product. That you are entitled to be aggrieved at the way the branding is used is not in question, what is is your giving the branding a meaning which it does not have.
Pro is not a generic, meaningless marketing term. Pro is a branding on Samsung SSD's that Samsung has been cultivating for a decade, which has a very well-defined meaning. Samsung Pro SSD's are 2-bit MLC with sustained write performance and high endurance.
This drive has none of the three things that has defined a Samsung Pro SSD for a decade.
They just threw a decade of brand building away with one product.
The near-zero change in random performance at QD1 for PCIe 3 vs. 4 was expected, but the very lot bump in high-QD sequential transfers was not. It's abundantly clear that PCIe 4 bandwidth, at least for desktop use, has no practical applications as of yet.
I wonder how the lower end NVME drives will fare when they move to PCIe 4.0? One of the hangups of using host drive map caching was the slower data path between the drive controller and the host memory that was imposed by having to cross the PCIe 3.0 lanes to get to the host memory. Eventually, cacheless controllers will move to PCIe 4.0. Will it be cheaper to make a cacheless PCIe 4.0 controller that actually uses all 4 lanes (some of the cheapest PCIe 3.0 cacheless controllers only used 2 lanes) than to stay with a more mature PCIe 3.0 controller that has a modest amount of cache with it? Will the performance be close enough to make that decision moot?
I don't expect PCIe 4.0 to provide any significant benefit to NVMe HMB operation. But widespread PCIe 4.0 support may eventually lead to low-end NVMe SSDs typically using just two PCIe lanes, and saving a bit more power that way.
This late in the game and being a "PRO" product, there are the 2TB and 4TB drives? Are people that are looking at the "PRO" line really that interested in sub-1TB drives these days? Especially 250GB drives?
These drives generally put out less heat than Samsung's previous generation of NVMe SSDs, except in a few circumstances where the performance is much higher—and even then, they put out less thermal energy for the same amount of work.
So in short there is basically very little benefit in moving from PCIe 3 to 4, even with this high end drive. Would have been interesting to see also a PCIe 2 x4 (or PCIe 3 x2) for comparison.
The type of NAND (and how it's accessed: using NVMe instead of AHCI) is more relevant than the connection itself. PCIe 3 is just one potential bottleneck. As you can read in the article multiple times, you'd really want multiple CPU cores and separated I/O queues to fully benefit from the increased bandwidth of PCIe 4.
Good price. I rather buy this than a comparable EVO. Are they trying to change their branding or why is that? We might see a 980 "Ultra" and EVOs all getting QLC instead.
The reviewers guide indicated that Samsung plans to continue using the PRO/EVO/QVO branding, but they don't have any new EVO or QVO drives to announce at this time. That's part of why I expect the EVO to continue on as a more entry-level TLC tier, without switching to QLC.
how is it not faster when on most charts it's well above the last generation? Also, why is MLC going to matter when the 1tb MLC has the same endurance as a 2tb evo plus? So is there no point in anyone having a 970 pro, regardless of their use case?
I can either have a 1tb 970 pro for $240 after various discounts and credits or I can have a 2tb 970 evo plus for $270 or a 1tb 980 pro for $190. So how to decide? I already have a 1tb 970 evo plus, but haven't built yet and want at least 2 or 3 samsung drives.
I just recently purchased a pair of Samsung 2TB 970 EVO Plus NVMe's to basically upgrading my older PC. They are super fast at 3500 MB/s sequential read speed. Its particulary felt in the booting-up process for sure. I question the necessity of the 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 because how fast does one really needs to go. I would think that for a few seconds here and there it's not worth it to graduate up again to the 4.0 world.
"I question the necessity of the 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 because how fast does one really needs to go."
That's not the point here. The point here is that the "980 Pro" is an EVO masquerading as a Pro. As others have said, it's likely a maneuver to foist QLC junk as the "upgrade" to the EVO line.
To validate your faster booting process claim, did you compare your "super fast 3500 MB/s sequential read speed" to a cheaper 2000 MB/s drive like an A2000, or merely to a HDD from ancient times? And if it's "a pair" and an "older PC", you're going to run out of PCIe lanes anyway, unless it's a reasonably beefy HEDT or you don't (really) need a graphics card.
Thank you for testing last 16GB stats. As someone who uses Nvme drives for offloading TBs of video footage at a time this is actually really helpful to my workflows.
Any reason though why there are no Sabrent drives benchmarked? They seem to be the most popular and best selling on Amazon. Seems like a good test to see if they are a value or if they are just cheap.
Sabrent drives are mostly or all Phison reference designs, sometimes with a custom heatsink. So their Rocket and Rocket 4.0 are basically equivalent to the Seagate drives featured in this review.
I do have the 8TB Sabrent Rocket Q, but paused testing of that to work on this review. The 8TB review will probably be my next one finished, but those big drives take a while to test.
Spelling error: "and thus having optimized products to go along with it has always been the case as new generations trump the told." Excess "t": "and thus having optimized products to go along with it has always been the case as new generations trump the old."
I'll read the rest when the benchmarks are completed.
I am no expert on comparing SSDs, but why are people saying the testing shows that the 970 pro is better to have than the 980 pro? MOST of the charts show the 980 pro well above the 970 pro and even the 970 evo and 970 evo plus above the 970 pro.
So what am i missing? And although the 970 pro is MLC, a 2tb evo plus would have the same 1200 for writes/endurance, albeit due to twice the space (but the more space is also a plus).
I actually have a 970 pro ordered because I got a deal where after discounts, even after tax, I am spending only $240. But I made the purchase just based on what people have said before about MLC and the evos needing an SLC cache, etc... But once I looked closer, I realized all of these specs where the evos (970 and 980) seem to be faster and the caches are big for most people.
hopefully, someone can explain where I know whether to cancel the order and get another evo plus or 980 pro instead... I have asked all over the place online and nobody gives me straight answers.
So basically the 980 Pro is a complete disaster considering the couple year old SX8200 Pro is beating it almost across the board and is half the price. Anandtech is disappointing here they should have been far more critical about this ssd.
I'm getting terrible IOPS numbers on this drive (980 pro 1 tb). Well not terrible, but noticeably worse than my 970 EVO 1 tb (not even the plus model). On the 980 pro: IOPS read at 374.511 and write at 334.228. On the 970 evo: IOPS read at 422.363 and write at 342.529.
That's both surprising and disappointing. Would not have bought it had I known this, it's advertised as up to 1.000.000 IOPS both read and write. I'm on PCI-E gen 3, so I might as well have spent less on another 970 evo then and gotten better performance.
Don't see anything from Samsung or anyone else about this issue, apart from there not being a Samsung driver for the 980 pro yet, so it still runs on the standard Microsoft driver, where all my other drives use the Samsung driver. Maybe that's why, but that should have been ready at launch of a flagship product.
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jeremyshaw - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Given how fast the TLC was when the SLC cache was exhausted (and was undoubtedly working on flushing the SLC cache into TLC), I wonder how much faster the native TLC mode of the SSD could be?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Their ISSCC 2019 presentation about the 512Gbit 128L die (which will be used in the 2TB 980 PRO) claims a write speed of 82MB/s per die. The 1TB 980 PRO is using a total of 32 of the 256Gbit dies, and if it's the same speed then that would work out to 2624 MB/s. So that suggests the total drive fill process is barely slowed down at all by the SLC caching dance, and a datacenter drive using this NAND and controller could hit almost twice the write throughput the current 960GB 983 DCT is rated for.System75 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Why don't you test a fully filled SSD performance anymore like you used to in AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy? An empty 980 pro drive performance is not what its target consumer wants to know.alyarb - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
thanks for the memories Samsung, but I'm outnandnandnand - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Is the Spirit of Hope dead?Hyoyeon - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
That SK Hynix P31 could become my new favorite drive.Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Not quite. The P31 is an amazing value, but I have yet to find a lower latency drive than a Samsung. The P31 does nip at the heels and even surprises in some tests, but it still falls massively short in many latency-sensitive situations where it is easily outclassed by the 970 EVO Plus and above. You get what you pay for.https://www.storagereview.com/review/sk-hynix-gold...
https://www.storagereview.com/review/sk-hynix-gold...
lmcd - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
For laptop usage that latency is not even close to worth it. I'm optimistic the upgrade from a 970 EVO (don't worry, it's primarily for a capacity upgrade) will help my inefficient Ryzen 2700U hold on a bit longer when off the charger.MikeMurphy - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
The P31 performs admirably and does so while consuming very little power and producing very little heat. It doesn't trounce the Samsung drives in every metric but at that price and power budget it doesn't have to.Samus - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
If Hynix wanted to crank up the heat and power consumption, there is nothing stopping them operating the controller at a higher frequency to reduce the latency caused by processing overhead.But they realize there is no need for this at the moment as they have a product that is class-leading in a class it doesn't even compete in.
Luckz - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
At reasonable things like 4K random IOPS, the 1TB P31 seems to crush the 2TB Evo Plus.Notmyusualid - Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - link
@ Hifi.. - yes totally agree on the latency.That is why TODAY I just received my 1TB 970 Pro for my laptop. Even choosing it over the 980's... it was the Avg write latency table that sealed the deal for me. (See ATSB Heavy / Write)
My Toshiba X5GP 2TB (supposedly enterprise class ssd) is not able to keep up with the huge writes my system endures most days. My write performance drops by about 10x, and when I replay my data, there are clear drop-outs.
The loss of capacity will be a pain, but I'll push old data to the 2TB, as reads on that disk are normal, and if I need to work on a data set, I'll just have to pull it across to the 970 Pro again.
My 2c.
romrunning - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
What this review has done for me is to whet my appetite for an Optane drive. I'm looking forward to seeing how the new AlderStream Optane drives perform!viktorp - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Right here with you. Goodbye Samsung, nice knowing you.Will advise all my clients to stay away form Samsung for mission critical storage.
Wish we had a choice of selecting SLC, MLC, TLC, trading capacity for reliability, if desired.
_Rain - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
For the sake of your clients, please advice them to use enterprise drives for mission critical storage.Those Qvos, Evos and Pros are just client storage drives and not meant for anything critical.
and of course you can limit the drives capacity to lesser value in order to gain some spare endurance. For example quote 384GB on 512GB drive will definitely double your endurance.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
"please advice them to use enterprise drives for mission critical storage."does anyone, besides me of course, remember when STEC made 'the best enterprise' SSD? anybody even know about STEC? or any of the other niche 'enterprise' SSD vendors?
XabanakFanatik - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
It's almost like my comment on the previous article about the anandtech bench showing the 970 Pro is still faster due to the move to TLC were accurate.On the random, when the 980 beats the 970 pro it's by the smallest margin.
Samsung has really let the professionals like myself that bought pro series drives exclusively down.
Not to mention over 2 years later than the 970 Pro and it's marginally faster sometimes outside raw burst sequential read/write.
Jorgp2 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Don't all GPUs already decompress textures?And the consoles only have hardware compression to get the most out of their CPUs, same for their audio hardware, video decoders, and hardware scalers.
There's plenty of efficient software compression techniques, Windows 10 even added new ones that can be applied at the filesystem level. They have good compression, and very little overhead to decompress in real time.
Only downside is that it's a windows 10 feature, that means it's half baked. Setting the compression flag is ignored by windows, you have to compress manually every time.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
"Don't all GPUs already decompress textures?"Traditional lossy texture compression is closer to throwing data out at a fixed ratio than it is compression in the lossless sense. Compressed textures don't get compressed so much as texture units interpolate the missing data on the fly.
This is opposed to lossless compression, which is closer to ZIP file compression. No data is lost, but it has to be explicitly unpacked/decompressed before it can be used. Certain lossless algorithms work on compressed textures, so games store texture data with lossless compression to further keep the game install sizes down. The trade-off being that all of this data then needs uncompressed before the GPU can work on it, and that is a job traditionally done by the CPU.
jordanclock - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
This fast of a drive combined with DirectStorage has me very excited for this particular reason. Though, as I understand it, DirectStorage requires the game to explicitly call the API and thus needs to be built into the game, as opposed to a passive boost to every game.msroadkill612 - Tuesday, October 13, 2020 - link
Yep. I find the raw sequential speeds exciting too - its not just about IOPS :)This processor load balancing coincides w/ some very handy advances in mainstream system memory - typically? 64GB (2x 32GB 3200 cl16 ~$220 atm) w/ speeds to ~45-50GB/s on AM4?,
a PCIE 4 GPU w/ a 32GB/s link vs the former 16GB/s. Its little mentioned, but seems an important plateau - ~64GB at 32GB/s seems a pretty usable supplemental tier of cache for the gpu?
quite possibly, nvme ports on the GPU's Infinity Fabric bus on ~BigNavi to bypass a potentially bottlenecked pcie bus - AMD did it before with a pro Vega card - an nvme raid array on the gpu.
individually they are increments in currently usable gaming memory & bandwidth (if not IOPS), but collectively they could be a force which affects gaming?
Games are what they are due to the restrictions of yore. Of course they are coded to isolate within gpu resources.. it was the only way to run fast enough. Reduce the restrictions tho, & add new usable resources, & games change to provide new & richer experiences.
MS FS is perhaps a forerunner of this new mindset - it likes massive memory, but is fun at 30FPS.
crabperson - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Thanks for the comparison to the PM1725a, I didn't realize how the lack of an SLC cache hurt it so much! I got a used 3.2 TB 'b version for a song, still holding out on Haswell here and probably won't upgrade until next year (Zen 3 may convince me otherwise).Looking forward to Phison's updated controllers and 2TB+ drives next year. Definitely don't need to waste money on the Pro line anymore.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
I was actually surprised how poorly the PM1725a fared on the consumer tests. I knew that the lack of SLC caching would hurt its writes, but it also appears to be heavily optimized for high queue depths at the expense of low queue depth performance.I'm planning to have some overlap between the enterprise and consumer synthetic benchmarks going forward, so there should be more opportunities to notice stuff like this.
ZeDestructor - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Any particular reson for not running the 3 desktop loads as well? I'm curious how the drives perform in more "real-world" desktop workloads tooBilly Tallis - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Time constraints, mostly. I grabbed the PM1725a because of its potential to show similar peak throughput, and it takes less than two hours to run the synthetic tests. A full set of ATSB results is a minimum of 12 hours plus however long it takes to fill the drive twice.ZeDestructor - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Couldn't you do it during downtime and then lump the results directly into bench? I'm not particularly fussed about having the results in this particular review, but they would be very nice to have around eventually™ for weirdos like me who buy used server drives for cheap and stick em into the desktop.PopinFRESH007 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
The Rocket 4 Plus was already announced and should be shipping this year with what looks to be better performance than this. Will be interesting to see what the price will be. The E18 also supports NVMe 1.4 rather than 1.3c on the 980 Pro.ToTTenTranz - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
So.. is this a SSD that can go into the PS5 as expandable storage?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Probably. Sony hasn't put out their list of officially approved/tested SSDs yet, but this one should qualify and then some.UltraWide - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
The RANDOM R/W scores are average. It looks like the SK Hynix is a better SSD for real world use.Chaitanya - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Worse than outgoing 970 series, thanks but no thanks Samsung.Alistair - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
I don't understand the conclusion here. The results were way worse than I expected. It doesn't appear like there is any reason to buy this at all.Exodite - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
So much this.Why wouldn't I get a, different, 2TB drive for the same price as the 1TB 980 Pro when the performance difference is negligible even in synthetic loads?
goatfajitas - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Its also cheaper, more like a 970 EVO replacement. Thinking of it that way, its a nice bump to replace my EVO. They really shouldn't have called it Pro though.Alistair - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
it isn't even a bump over the PCIe 3.0 Hynix drive...lmcd - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
It's a small bump over the Hynix drive. It's better in latency and burst. Those are both very relevant metrics for day-to-day usage.Spunjji - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
None of these metrics are really relevant in day-to-day usage. In that respect, you won't really notice the difference between any of these and a decent SATA drive.CheapSushi - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
It absolutely is. In fact, Optane is even better. The vast majority of people spend their time doing low queue depth random read and write. It IS noticeable unless you ONLY use your PC for Gmail and Facebook.shaddixboggs - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Lol, why do you think this? You cannot and will not notice that small of a difference.Tomatotech - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
It does seem rather overpriced. Something like the ADATA SX8200 PRO 1TB which is a perfectly fine fast drive hovers around half the price of this. The ADATA drive is slightly worse performing but it’s still a bloody fast NVMe drive and the difference is near undetectable to the user.Other drives are also cheaper and give sustained performance under full disk write (which the ADATA doesn’t, but if you regularly write 900GB in one go to your NVME drive you have special requirements.)
Tomatotech - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Updating my comment - StorageReview tested the 980 Pro with enterprise workloads. It seems a fantastic performer there, with some of the highest numbers I’ve ever seen, especially in random 4K r/w, which is an area I’ve long felt nvme was neglecting. The 980 Pro is a drive that finally performs well in this area.That said, that performance requires a monster 128 queue depth which is fine in enterprise but is very rarely seen in desktop computing. Oh well, it’s called Pro for a reason. That aspect of its performance justifies the price in my view.
https://www.storagereview.com/review/samsung-980-p...
Someguyperson - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Why haven't you tested any Phison E16 drives yet? I get that power consumption was seen as an issue, but with these drives pulling 20 watts, I don't think Phison E16 drives would be all that different. That said, the only way to validate any of those claims is by actually testing the drives. Which you haven't done yet.Slash3 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
The Firecuda 520 is a Phison E16 design.londedoganet - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
> Samsung Elpisouk élabon pólin; álla gàr elpìs éphē kaká
pogostick - Friday, October 2, 2020 - link
I have no idea what this says, but I know exactly what it says.Duncan Macdonald - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
An extreme endurance drive (all SLC) would seem to be a useful niche product for some users. It should be possible to produce such a drive with just a software modification to the controller. Obviously the cost/GB would be much higher but for some uses the extra cost would be worth it.(The same amount of NAND that would provide 2TB in TLC mode would only provide around 600GB in SLC mode.)
Tomatotech - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
You’re talking about enterprise SSDs. They’re over that way. And one was included in the testing in this very article you’re reading.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
"(The same amount of NAND that would provide 2TB in TLC mode would only provide around 600GB in SLC mode.)"if memory serves, at least one of the AT SSD reviewers has pointed out that TLC/QLC NAND run in 'SLC mode' isn't actually SLC. and doesn't perform like it.
CheapSushi - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Get OPTANE. Why do so many people constantly overlook Optane? Optane has even higher endurance than SLC.lilmoe - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
With the move to 128l 8nm NAND, I was hoping for MLC with higher capacity, faster performance and lower prices at the same endurance level of the 970 Pro.But with TLC, this is still significantly more expensive than the EVO Plus, and not worth it for the average consumer considering the competition. It's just making Hynix Gold look that much better. This isn't what the Pro series customers wanted, Samsung...
Oh well, RIP Pro line... Really disappointed.
romrunning - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Agreed!Tomatotech - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
See the StoragePro review for some eyebrow-raising numbers that may change your view.https://www.storagereview.com/review/samsung-980-p...
Tams80 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
What's the point of these if they are going to use TLC? They already make TLC SSDs and the market is pretty full.So what if using MLC is more expensive? Isn't the whole point of these to be their best of the best? And if an SLC cache benefits TLC SSDs, then why not have an MLC SSD with an SLC cache?
Kaziglu Bey - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Not the hope we're looking for.Time for me to buy another 2TB SX8200 Pro.
vladx - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
Yep, beyond enterprise workloads there's no point buying anything other than the SSD with best price/GB.Makaveli - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
What were they thinking here.600 TBW on this "Pro" drive then a small 114GB SLC cache?
The E16 offers 1,800 TBW at 1TB and 333GB SLC cache.
Not impressed with this drive and looking forward to the E18 drives that are slowly coming out.
Luckz - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
You mean it will just use the entire empty SSD, because leaving the SSD empty is both a 'feature' and a smart use case? I barely even have 10% free on actively used SSDs.Golgatha777 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
For $20 more, I'll take a slight performance hit, but gain 4X the endurance by buying a 512GB 970 Pro. There's been nothing worth upgrading to since the 950 Pro when it comes to real world usage anyway though.MDD1963 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
I've written 30 TB in 3 years to my 960 EVO...; folks worried about 'only' 600 TBW (60 years at my rate usage?) specs are amusing.Makaveli - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
And its assuming to me that you think your anecdotal point speaks for the whole market.XabanakFanatik - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
You, sir, are not the target market for a PRO series drive.Railgun - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
While the article is painfully incomplete, its 3.0 performance is a bit of a moot point. I’m particularly waiting for the 4.0 test results as that’s what will count here.WaltC - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
MBs per watt...not very useful for performance scenarios, imo. I agree this is not one of AT's shining moments...;)Notmyusualid - Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - link
@ Railgun - it is valid testing for those of us whos m/b's only support PCIe3...Ashantus - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Hell anandtech,i am badly missing the comparison to the modern M2- PCI 4.0 SSD with Toshiba Nanad and Phison E-16 controller. So either the Corsair MP600 or the Gigabyte Aorus. Other websites did the comparison in their Test, and Samsung hit the floor.
Are you trying to protect Samsung by avoiding the big competitors?
Makaveli - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Reading comprehension is important."Any Phison E16 Drive at PCIe 4.0, such as Seagate FireCuda 520"
This drive is in the review!
Luckz - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
There's even (at least) two of these reading allergy guys in the comments here.ppi - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
"Hype for the upcoming generation of game consoles has suggested that future video games may reach the point of needing the equivalent of an entire CPU core to manage IO, but that's only after using the equivalent of several more cores to decompress data and feed it to a powerful GPU running the kind of game engine that doesn't exist yet. Our new benchmark suite will be designed with such workloads in mind, but current consumer workloads aren't there yet and won't be for at least a few years."Major developers have had access to new consoles for some time already. I would not be surprised to see it used next year in some technologically ambitious game, or even in Cyberpunk 2077.
Slash3 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
On the PC side, it's basically predicated on Microsoft incorporating final Directstorage API support into a Windows update, which likely won't happen until the middle of next year.PopinFRESH007 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Likely not untrue, but it isn't solely in the hands of Microsoft. Developers will still be able to leverage RTXIO, however, as we've seen with many other NVIDIA technologies there are a few games that will take advantage and the bulk will stick to less proprietary technologies. As such I think we will likely only see RTXIO leveraged via DirectStorage for games that are developed cross platform for Xbox Series X|S and Windows 10 PC.Slash3 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Yeah, we may get a few early test case scenarios through an Nvidia demonstration or partner product, but any major release will probably wait to land concurrently with a full fat Directstorage update from Microsoft. I'm looking forward to it, as I've got a pretty fast storage subsystem and very few games take advantage of it even during asset loading.vanish1 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
no headphone jack, no purchase.racerx_is_alive - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Do we know enough about the new DirectStorage API to make a prediction about how this will perform against the 4.0 Phison controller next year? Seems like that will be a real world situation that will use lots more queues and shift performance towards the Samsung.KenK74 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
This product release is a real yawner. I am keeping my 970 Pro's, and will be searching anywhere but Samsung for decent TLC's with Hardware Encryption capability when I need another. Depending on platform, software Bitlocker may not slow the drive down much, or might do so a lot. For laptops, the real problem is the extra CPU power for software encryption that exceeds differences in SSD power among the SSD drives. Yeah, hardware bitlocker has its issues, but it seems the most power efficient option for laptops that need bitlocker. Meanwhile for non-hardware encrypted drives, the SK Hynix P31 looks very good, runs with the PCI4 drives in many aspects,, and has a great price.PopinFRESH007 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Which Phision controller are you referencing? They have multiple PCIe 4.0 controllers and most of them are already available. The E16T has been available in multiple products since early in the year and the E18 is the controller for the recently announced Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus which (on paper) looks to offer better performance than the 980 Pro. The Rocket 4 Plus looks like it should also be available this year and there are a couple of other drives that are expected to launch in Q4 that will also likely be using the E18dudlej84 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
I'm confused by the conclusion claiming it regains the performance crown, but the results seem to show it beaten quite often, even by the 970 pro and 970 evo plus in some cases. What am I missing?XabanakFanatik - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
You're not missing anything, this is just corporate ass-wiping to reward Samsung for their terrible marketing decision to devalue the Pro brand they've been creating for a decade.StrangerGuy - Friday, September 25, 2020 - link
Besides their flagship phones, I can't think of any Samsung product that aren't terrible in terms of value for money in recent years.alexdi - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
This is not a Pro drive. "Pro" means it maintains performance. This is a slightly faster Evo Plus and underwhelming for the price.PeachNCream - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
That is some trash endurance for the price. The performance numbers are okay, but not the slightest bit earth shattering. I guess in the grand scheme of things, there appears to be no really good reason for this drive to even have gone into production for as little as it brings to the table. At least it isn't QLC, but it's pretty obvious that we have reached the end of NAND and need a more durable and higher density storage medium for the solid state side of the equation.Tomatotech - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
NAND has a long way to go yet. It took a while for SATA SSDs to take off then they were bumping at the top of the SATA bandwidth for many years. Now the PCIe NVME drives are shooting up in data transfer speeds faster than the PCIe committee can bring out new speeds. NVME drives were all clustered at the top of PCIe 3.0 for a few years; PCIe 4.0 has only just come out and already much of the new headroom has gone. At this point the main bottlenecks are the drive controller chips and the PCIe standards themselves. 5.0 is being rushed out for a reason and it isn’t for GPU cards.MFinn3333 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Modern SSD's endurance being small is mostly a myth. The last test I saw was on a Crucial BX500 120GB and it wrote 1.2PB on it before it gave out while a smaller 32GB hit around 250TB. The amount of voltage hitting the cells has dropped significantly over the years when they switched to Charged Trap Flash.The 600TBW is the minimum the drive will write.
Pinn - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Curious about cooling. It looks bare but not near a GPU? Did you see thermal throttling?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
The most recent SMART log for the 1TB 980 PRO indicates that it has spent about two minutes at or above the warning temperature (82C) but hasn't hit the critical temperature (85C). And that's out of about 14 power-on hours of testing. The SMART logs for the 250GB drive indicate that it has not hit its warning temperature.back2future - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
What's the cells endurance and storage data stability compared at DWPD=0.3 on these high temperatures (179F, 82C) with long term comparison? What to expect on 5 year professional (high throughput) usage patterns?Oxford Guy - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
“Samsung is abandoning the use of the two bit per cell (MLC) memory that has been the hallmark of the PRO product lines, and with the 980 PRO, Samsung is finally switching to three bit per cell (TLC) NAND flash memory.Along with switching to TLC NAND, Samsung has cut the write endurance ratings in half to 0.3 DWPD and dropped the usable capacities down to the typical TLC/EVO levels of 250/500/1000 GB instead of 256/512/1024 GB. TLC means the 980 PRO now relies on SLC caching for its peak write speeds, and write performance will drop substantially if the SLC cache is ever filled.”
Finally!
What consumers hope for: Worse endurance and worse performance. Higher profits for the company selling it.
Notmyusualid - Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - link
@ Oxford - pretty much sums it up for me.Whiteknight2020 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
"Pro" means precisely and exactly, absolutely 0% of sod all. And always has. Either a product fits ones particular use case or it does not. I'm a "pro", in that I design, integrate an build Telco grade data centre systems deployments. I don't have a use for 600TBW to a 1TB drive, I'll never write that in it's useful life. I don't have a use for 6GB/s transfer rates. I do have a use for multiterabyte ssds at reasonable (1GB/s) transfer rates. For me, that would be a "pro" drive. For other workloads an entirely different "pro" profile is needed. There are few blanket use cases, except perhaps standard consumer laptop drives.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
"'Pro' means precisely and exactly, absolutely 0% of sod all."You're correct and you're incorrect.
You're correct in the sense that Samsung has rendered "Pro" no longer compelling by selling inferior TLC NAND in this product, undermining the established reputation of its Pro-labeled product line.
You're incorrect in terms of this:
"And always has."
This is objectively flatly false. Samsung's Pro-labeled products have existed in the market for quite some time. They have an established reputation for targeting a specific level of performance and having other characteristics, like high-endurance MLC NAND.
Tomatotech - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
See the StoragePro review. This drive has some fantastic numbers under enterprise workloads.For home use? I’m not so sure about the value there. There’s a reason it’s called Pro.
https://www.storagereview.com/review/samsung-980-p...
AmericanLocomotive - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Except when you compare it to the 970 Evo Plus or 970 Pro, it's not really any better at all.https://www.storagereview.com/review/sabrent-rocke...
MFinn3333 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
"In 4K write activity, the Samsung 980 Pro was ahead by a mile with a peak performance of 383,099 IOPS and a latency of 329.1ms. The next best drive only reached 144K IOPS and almost 900ms in latency.""The Samsung SSD 980 Pro is the best-performing consumer drive we’ve tested to date, it more than doubled the numbers of its competitors in some areas. "
Right, it's so not better at all...
AmericanLocomotive - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
Yeah, compared to the chosen drives in that review. Cherry picked drives to make the 980pro look better. Compare it to the 970 Pro numbers in this review: https://www.storagereview.com/review/sabrent-rocke...It's hardly better at all.
MFinn3333 - Friday, September 25, 2020 - link
The Sabrent Rocket Gen3 drive was included in the review.Notmyusualid - Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - link
+1techxx - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Why in the world would anyone buy this over the SN750 at $110?Oxford Guy - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Samsung seems to be hoping it can rely on the Pro branding to get people to buy TLC without knowing it. The article mentions that other companies have dropped MLC so Samsung may be betting on two things:1. It will be possible to coast for a bit on the Pro name, before enough people catch on. So, a bit of extra money can be made via the legacy of MLC.
2. By the time consumers catch on they won't be so mad because of the power of the "everyone else is doing it" fallacy.
StrangerGuy - Friday, September 25, 2020 - link
They will, if they want to pay their due idiot taxes to Samsung.Which is quite a big crowd judging from QVO sales numbers, and that's a much more offensively bad product than the 980 Pro.
James5mith - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
"...the 980 PRO is an improvement ... over the 970 EVO Plus, but is not as fast as the MLC-based 970 PRO."I think that (edited) comment sums up the entire launch of this product.
Quantumz0d - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Sabrent Rock 4 Plus is going to be my next drive. No more MLC = No more Samsung tax and not worth buying this at all, those have even higher TBW and more SLC caching than this garbage overpriced product with false PRO tag.5j3rul3 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
980 Pro (X)980 EVO (O)
DarkMatter69 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Could the comparison include some of the fastest M.2 SSDs already in market, e.g. Sabrent Rocket 4, Corsair MP600, Aorus NVM, etc.? the comparison drives used in this article are not the fastest ones, so it is difficult to understand how good is this M.2 drive vs all the other top ones in the market already. Thank you!Slash3 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
I'd also like to see a few more models make their way through the Anandtech tests, but the Seagate Firecuda 520 in this review is essentially representative of the models you listed. They're all based on what are effectively reference Phison E16 designs and can even be cross-flashed with the same firmware. Upcoming Phison E18 based drives should shake things up a little bit more and will be the true point of comparison for the 980 Pro.Koenig168 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
980 Evo masquerading as 980 Pro.yetanotherhuman - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
TLC != Pro. Forget it. 2-bit or bust.twtech - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
The write endurance on this drive is identical to the 970 EVO. Yeah, it may be a bit faster - especially being PCIE 4.0 - but it's not like you can use it in ways that you can't use the (much cheaper) non-Pro drives now.Whiteknight2020 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
And you are entirely missing the point. "Pro" is a generic, meaningless, marketing term. Just look on Amazon for "pro" branded items, ranging from cheap tat to quality (for specific use cases) items. You are choosing to interpret the way a marketing/branding term has previously been applied to product by a manufacturer as having a fixed value and meaning which it does not, it is merely branding and ascribes no specific technical, functional or physical properties to the product. That you are entitled to be aggrieved at the way the branding is used is not in question, what is is your giving the branding a meaning which it does not have.XabanakFanatik - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Pro is not a generic, meaningless marketing term. Pro is a branding on Samsung SSD's that Samsung has been cultivating for a decade, which has a very well-defined meaning. Samsung Pro SSD's are 2-bit MLC with sustained write performance and high endurance.This drive has none of the three things that has defined a Samsung Pro SSD for a decade.
They just threw a decade of brand building away with one product.
edzieba - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
The near-zero change in random performance at QD1 for PCIe 3 vs. 4 was expected, but the very lot bump in high-QD sequential transfers was not. It's abundantly clear that PCIe 4 bandwidth, at least for desktop use, has no practical applications as of yet.lightningz71 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
I wonder how the lower end NVME drives will fare when they move to PCIe 4.0? One of the hangups of using host drive map caching was the slower data path between the drive controller and the host memory that was imposed by having to cross the PCIe 3.0 lanes to get to the host memory. Eventually, cacheless controllers will move to PCIe 4.0. Will it be cheaper to make a cacheless PCIe 4.0 controller that actually uses all 4 lanes (some of the cheapest PCIe 3.0 cacheless controllers only used 2 lanes) than to stay with a more mature PCIe 3.0 controller that has a modest amount of cache with it? Will the performance be close enough to make that decision moot?Billy Tallis - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
I don't expect PCIe 4.0 to provide any significant benefit to NVMe HMB operation. But widespread PCIe 4.0 support may eventually lead to low-end NVMe SSDs typically using just two PCIe lanes, and saving a bit more power that way.anad0commenter - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
This is very disappointing. I guess we should expect 980 EVO to be QLC based next year.kevin.mcc - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
This late in the game and being a "PRO" product, there are the 2TB and 4TB drives? Are people that are looking at the "PRO" line really that interested in sub-1TB drives these days? Especially 250GB drives?XabanakFanatik - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Nope. Nobody looking at the PRO drives was interested in TLC, either. The entire product is crap.FXi - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
These things run hot. Be very careful what devices you put them into.Billy Tallis - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
These drives generally put out less heat than Samsung's previous generation of NVMe SSDs, except in a few circumstances where the performance is much higher—and even then, they put out less thermal energy for the same amount of work.fred666 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
So in short there is basically very little benefit in moving from PCIe 3 to 4, even with this high end drive.Would have been interesting to see also a PCIe 2 x4 (or PCIe 3 x2) for comparison.
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
I do have a handful of results from the Samsung XP941 in Bench: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2227?vs=26...That's a PCIe 2.0 drive, but uses AHCI instead of NVMe.
Luckz - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
The type of NAND (and how it's accessed: using NVMe instead of AHCI) is more relevant than the connection itself.PCIe 3 is just one potential bottleneck. As you can read in the article multiple times, you'd really want multiple CPU cores and separated I/O queues to fully benefit from the increased bandwidth of PCIe 4.
Beaver M. - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Good price. I rather buy this than a comparable EVO.Are they trying to change their branding or why is that?
We might see a 980 "Ultra" and EVOs all getting QLC instead.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
The reviewers guide indicated that Samsung plans to continue using the PRO/EVO/QVO branding, but they don't have any new EVO or QVO drives to announce at this time. That's part of why I expect the EVO to continue on as a more entry-level TLC tier, without switching to QLC.Luke212 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Terrible release. No faster after all this time. And to be outclassed by E18 Phisonjtester - Wednesday, October 14, 2020 - link
how is it not faster when on most charts it's well above the last generation? Also, why is MLC going to matter when the 1tb MLC has the same endurance as a 2tb evo plus? So is there no point in anyone having a 970 pro, regardless of their use case?I can either have a 1tb 970 pro for $240 after various discounts and credits or I can have a 2tb 970 evo plus for $270 or a 1tb 980 pro for $190. So how to decide? I already have a 1tb 970 evo plus, but haven't built yet and want at least 2 or 3 samsung drives.
Tom Sunday - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
I just recently purchased a pair of Samsung 2TB 970 EVO Plus NVMe's to basically upgrading my older PC. They are super fast at 3500 MB/s sequential read speed. Its particulary felt in the booting-up process for sure. I question the necessity of the 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 because how fast does one really needs to go. I would think that for a few seconds here and there it's not worth it to graduate up again to the 4.0 world.Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
"I question the necessity of the 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 because how fast does one really needs to go."That's not the point here. The point here is that the "980 Pro" is an EVO masquerading as a Pro. As others have said, it's likely a maneuver to foist QLC junk as the "upgrade" to the EVO line.
Luckz - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
To validate your faster booting process claim, did you compare your "super fast 3500 MB/s sequential read speed" to a cheaper 2000 MB/s drive like an A2000, or merely to a HDD from ancient times? And if it's "a pair" and an "older PC", you're going to run out of PCIe lanes anyway, unless it's a reasonably beefy HEDT or you don't (really) need a graphics card.im.thatoneguy - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
Thank you for testing last 16GB stats. As someone who uses Nvme drives for offloading TBs of video footage at a time this is actually really helpful to my workflows.Any reason though why there are no Sabrent drives benchmarked? They seem to be the most popular and best selling on Amazon. Seems like a good test to see if they are a value or if they are just cheap.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
Sabrent drives are mostly or all Phison reference designs, sometimes with a custom heatsink. So their Rocket and Rocket 4.0 are basically equivalent to the Seagate drives featured in this review.I do have the 8TB Sabrent Rocket Q, but paused testing of that to work on this review. The 8TB review will probably be my next one finished, but those big drives take a while to test.
clieuser - Sunday, September 27, 2020 - link
How fast the 980 pro with PCIE 3.0, not with PCIE 4.0?ballsystemlord - Tuesday, September 29, 2020 - link
Spelling error:"and thus having optimized products to go along with it has always been the case as new generations trump the told."
Excess "t":
"and thus having optimized products to go along with it has always been the case as new generations trump the old."
I'll read the rest when the benchmarks are completed.
Nyceis - Thursday, October 1, 2020 - link
Wonder when the 2TB will be available....Oxford Guy - Saturday, October 3, 2020 - link
We hope you won’t notice it’s an EVO.jtester - Wednesday, October 14, 2020 - link
I am no expert on comparing SSDs, but why are people saying the testing shows that the 970 pro is better to have than the 980 pro? MOST of the charts show the 980 pro well above the 970 pro and even the 970 evo and 970 evo plus above the 970 pro.So what am i missing? And although the 970 pro is MLC, a 2tb evo plus would have the same 1200 for writes/endurance, albeit due to twice the space (but the more space is also a plus).
I actually have a 970 pro ordered because I got a deal where after discounts, even after tax, I am spending only $240. But I made the purchase just based on what people have said before about MLC and the evos needing an SLC cache, etc... But once I looked closer, I realized all of these specs where the evos (970 and 980) seem to be faster and the caches are big for most people.
hopefully, someone can explain where I know whether to cancel the order and get another evo plus or 980 pro instead... I have asked all over the place online and nobody gives me straight answers.
entrigant - Wednesday, November 11, 2020 - link
So the new Pro is an EVO. Wonderful. This is most disappointing. :( Guess I should stock up on 970 Pro's while I still can.ph1nn - Friday, November 27, 2020 - link
So basically the 980 Pro is a complete disaster considering the couple year old SX8200 Pro is beating it almost across the board and is half the price. Anandtech is disappointing here they should have been far more critical about this ssd.Krakadoom - Wednesday, January 27, 2021 - link
I'm getting terrible IOPS numbers on this drive (980 pro 1 tb). Well not terrible, but noticeably worse than my 970 EVO 1 tb (not even the plus model). On the 980 pro: IOPS read at 374.511 and write at 334.228. On the 970 evo: IOPS read at 422.363 and write at 342.529.That's both surprising and disappointing. Would not have bought it had I known this, it's advertised as up to 1.000.000 IOPS both read and write. I'm on PCI-E gen 3, so I might as well have spent less on another 970 evo then and gotten better performance.
Don't see anything from Samsung or anyone else about this issue, apart from there not being a Samsung driver for the 980 pro yet, so it still runs on the standard Microsoft driver, where all my other drives use the Samsung driver. Maybe that's why, but that should have been ready at launch of a flagship product.
chickenballs - Sunday, February 21, 2021 - link
for most ppl the ADATA 8200pro is more than enough and costs half as much