Samsung’s new 980 NVMe SSD costs less to make, so it costs less to buy

Samsung has announced its latest SSD, a sequel to the 970 Evo called 980. The drive is an NVMe M.2 PCIe 3.0 drive and also affordable. It costs up to $ 129.99 for the 1TB version and up to $ 49.99 for the 250GB model.

There’s a reason for the low price: it’s Samsung’s very first DRAM-less NVMe SSD, a cost-saving measure that many other storage manufacturers have been successful with to varying degrees. The 980 has a fast dynamic memory for random access that is commonly used to map the contents of an SSD, which can help your data quickly and efficiently.

Despite the removal of the feature, Samsung delivers impressive performance compared to other DRAM-less options, as this drive uses the Host Memory Buffer feature in the NVMe specification. In Samsung’s case, it taps up to 64MB of your CPU’s DRAM via PCIe to pick up the slack on behalf of the SSD. The result is not as fast as an SSD with its own DRAM, but the Host Memory Buffer feature helps it perform much better than a model that completely lacks it – while delivering some savings. Samsung says that this SSD can achieve up to six times the speed of a SATA-based SSD.

Samsung’s intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 feature also helps with the fast speeds, which multiplies the maximum allocated buffer range within the 980 to as much as 160 GB, compared to just 42 GB in the 970 Evo. This feature simulates fast single-layer cell (SLC) performance in the 980, despite using 3-bit multilayer cell memory (MLC), and it is aimed at sustained performance while transferring large files.

Image: Samsung

Samsung claims that the 1TB version of the 980 to 3,500MB / s can offer sequential read and 3,000MB / s write speeds, which is roughly equal to its fast (and more expensive) 970 Evo Plus SSD, which is the best 970 Evo’s top series is. write speed. However, it is far from Samsung’s 980 Pro, which boasts sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000 MB / s and 5,000 MB / s, respectively, when paired with a PCIe 4.0-ready motherboard.

As usual, there is a sharp decline in performance for less capacity: the low 250 GB model, for example, demands up to 2,900 MB / s consecutive read and 1,300 MB / s consecutive write speeds. One of the other big highlights here in the series is that Samsung, even without DRAM, claims that the random read and write input and output during intensive tasks is similar to the 970 Evo and not far from the 970 Evo Plus.

So, even though a component that helps an SSD get lost quickly, Samsung’s 980 still looks very fast. If you’re curious, Samsung’s testing systems that provide these benchmarks include an Intel Core i7-6700K, the Ryzen 7 3700X, and 8 GB of 2,133 MHz DDR4 RAM.