New Samsung 980 SSD improves the performance of 970 EVO, EVO Plus

Samsung’s latest generation NVMe storage for mid-range consumers is available today – the new drive is simply called ‘Samsung 980′ without any suffix. The review guide Samsung provided us with a comparison of the new disc with the previous generation’s 970 EVO – we did not have a 970 EVO on hand, but a 970 EVO Plus and a 970 Pro did, so this is the previous generation drives us’ We compare the new 980 with today.

A TLC drive with any other name

Samsung 980 SSD

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If your NAND storage conditions are not 100% utilized, the first thing we need to talk about is cell lacquers. The fastest and most durable NAND storage is SLC – the Single Level Cell. An SLC NAND cell has only two values ​​- 0 and 1, or if you prefer, on and off. An SLC NAND cell can therefore store a single piece of data. From there we have MLC that can store two bits, TLC that can store three and QLC that can store four data bits per cell.

Samsung calls the 980 a “three-bit MLC” SSD, which is much like the reference to a red car as “pink”. To justify this, the company relies on the fact that ‘M’ stands for ‘Multi’ – so in plain English, ‘three-bit MLC’ can make sense, even though it’s completely nonsense in the established terminology of SSDs. From now on we will call it: TLC.

As the data density of NAND cells increases, their speed and writing endurance decrease – it takes more time and effort to read or write one of eight discrete voltage levels to a cell than to turn on / off a simple, unambiguous get or set up. value.

To some extent, this disadvantage can be overcome with parallelism – by dividing the same 1MiB write between eight banks of NAND, you can get much lower latency and higher throughput than you would if the whole 1MiB was written to a single bank had to be. This is the main reason that even within the same SSD model SSDs with larger capacity are almost always faster than smaller ones.

A larger, more dynamic SLC cabinet

To further accelerate the writing, you need a faster buffer area – which you can get by simply setting up a portion of your NAND as a faster-moving SLC with higher endurance. The physical media does not have to be really different; your SSD controller simply needs to know how to handle it this way.

In earlier versions of Samsung SSDs, the SLC buffer area was corrected – but with the 960 EVO, Samsung introduced controllers what it calls’ Intelligent ‘Turbowrite’, which is a dynamic amount of SLC buffer that can be configured by the controller itself. In the 960 EVO and 970 EVO, the ‘intelligent’ buffer area was a subset of the total SLC case – the 980 introduces a much larger and for the first time completely dynamic SLC case.

This huge (3.5x to 5.5x) increase in the fast case area means that relatively empty 980 SSDs can perform better than earlier Samsung EVO models, delaying the point at which a user ‘falls off the cliff’ much longer. The impact of ‘falling off the cliff’ is worse for smaller drives – but even with the 1TB model, this means that top speeds are reduced by as much as three-quarters.

Samsung’s improvements here do not make the writing stone disappear – if you write more than the maximum amount of SLC cache without giving the ride a few moments to breathe, performance will still decline. But the sharply increased delay before it hits is a welcome change.

Performance

Samsung’s review guide compares the new 980 to the latest generation’s 970 EVO. Unfortunately we did not have a 1TB 970 EVO on hand – but a 1TB 970 EVO Plus and a 1TB 970 Pro did. It is not surprising that the new 980 mostly falls between the previous generation’s EVO Plus and Pro.

The 970 Pro does not use an SLC cache at all and therefore does not fall off the same “writing pad” as the 980 does in the end. In the longest test above – the random 1MiB write, which we used fio rather than CrystalDiskMark like the others – this gives the 970 Pro the chance to run clean away from the 980 before the test ends.

The 980 Pro is significantly faster than the 970 EVO Plus in random and consecutive 1MiB workload, but the increase does not really appeal to users where the pain lives. If we decrease to 4KiB workloads, there is little to choose from between these stations.

In other words, if you make large numbers very fat to make you happy, the 980 makes them bigger and happier than its predecessor. But if you hope that a nice new drive will repair you slow copying problems probably did not work out – the 980 is no worse or better than other recent Samsung NVMe drives.

Price

The MSRP on the Samsung 980 has taken a sharp downward turn, probably largely due to the DRAM less (and therefore cheaper to manufacture) design.

As of the time of publication, the retail prices on Samsung 970 EVO Plus cost $ 60, $ 80 and $ 160 for its 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB models. We have not yet seen the right prices on the Samsung 980, but the MSRP is significantly lower – especially for the larger model – at $ 50, $ 70 and $ 130 respectively.

The big price drop on the 1TB model makes the argument of ‘big buy’ even stronger. Even if you only have a little data, bigger drives are faster, you have better writing endurance and you have more consistent work. The $ 80 price difference between a 250GB Samsung 980 and its 1TB big brother or sister is a worthwhile investment – especially if you want to use the same drive at the best performance for over 5 years.

Conclusions

Samsung’s new 980 is an excellent mid-range consumer. With a drastically increased SLC write buffer area, it can deliver more consistently high performance and longer than previous generations. It’s still not a Pro-level drive – if you’re writing tons of data to your SSD for long periods of time, you’ll still want to spend more on a design that does not rely on SLC cache in the first place. But most consumers – including gamers – will not fall into this category.

On the other hand, size still matters – the larger the SSD you buy, the more endurance and fast case write, and you increase capacity. Even if you only have 200 GB of data, the extra muscle that comes with a 1 TB SSD is worth the extra cost.

The good

• More consistent performance than 970 EVO Plus
• Higher maximum performance than 970 EVO Plus
• Lower cost than 970 EVO Plus makes larger SSDs more affordable
• Updated thermal design for increased reliability

The bad

• Ever-changing brand for consumers – EVO, EVO Plus, non-EVO, Pro. We’re waiting for ‘Samsung 9000 Blackwatch Plaid’
• Stop trying to make ‘three-bit MLC’ happen, Samsung!

The Ugly