Samsung 980 1TB SSD

A strange drive for stranger times, says a perfectly normal Alan Dexter.

SPECS

Model: MZ-V8V1T0BW

Capacity: 1TB

Interface: M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4

Controller: Samsung Pablo

NAND: Samsung 6th-gen V-NAND

Seq. read: 3,500MB/s

Seq. write: 3,000MB/s

Endurance: 600TBW

Warranty: Five years

The Samsung 980 is the latest M.2 NVMe SSD to hit the virtual shelves. Unlike the Samsung 980 Pro version that came before it, this is a PCIe 3.0 drive, but keep reading. This means the sequential read and write speeds top out a lot lower than its predecessor – half for the reads in fact, and not far off that for the writes as well. The good news is the price has dropped in line with this spec as well, and at £120 for this 1TB model, you’re looking at £0.12/GB.

Three new drives are being introduced, with this 1TB drive being joined by 500GB and 250GB SSDs as well. All the drives use the same Samsung Pablo controller, backed up by the company’s own sixth-generation V-NAND, which is the same as can be found in the 980 Pro. This 1TB drive is the fastest of three thanks to more of the controller’s channels being populated.

At first glance this latest PCIe 3.0 SSD is a direct replacement for the Samsung 970 Evo, but the big news here is the Samsung 980 is a DRAMless drive, as in there’s no DRAM buffer present. DRAM generally helps the most with write performance, but Samsung believes it can save some cash on this front and still provide decent performance thanks to the use of its Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature and Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 tech, which on this 1TB model sets aside a chunky 160GB for improved performance.