The new Samsung SSD 980 is the first NVMe SSD ready for retail from Samsung. Compared to previous Samsung SSDs, it lacks no three-letter suffix at the end: it’s not a PRO, nor an EVO or even a QVO drive, because it does not fit into established conventions for those product levels. The SSD 980 is at the bottom of the product stack, but leaves a big enough gap for another, possibly better, model to come in later. Samsung is marketing the SSD 980 as a successor to the 970 EVO.
Samsung’s first push for retail NVMs
The SSD 980 is an entry-level NVMe SSD that uses TLC NAND with a DRAMless controller. This makes it a new class of product for Samsung in the retail market, one it has never manufactured before. This type of drive, with TLC and without DRAM, is already in the market of other sellers of turn-key solutions, and this type of drive is very popular with OEMs: it enables them to advertise an NVMe SSD without using the cost of a high-end drive.
The new Samsung SSD 980 has three capacities, 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB. In this review we have the two highest capabilities, with a Samsung controller and a variety of TLC NAND (explained in more detail below). As an NVMe disk rated for PCIe 3.0 x4, the peak sequential read speeds for the 1 TB disk are rated up to 3.5 GB / s. The chips will be rated up to 0.3 chips per day (ie 300 GB / day on the 1 TB model) for five years.
| Samsung SSD 980 Specifications | |||||
| Capacity | 250 GB | 500 GB | 1 TB | ||
| Form factor | Single-sided M.2 2280 | ||||
| Interface | PCIe 3.0 x4, NVMe 1.4 | ||||
| Admin | Samsung Pablo | ||||
| DRAM | No | ||||
| NAND Flash | Samsung 92L 256Gb TLC |
Samsung 128L 512Gb TLC |
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| Consecutive Read | 2900 MB / s | 3100 MB / s | 3500 MB / s | ||
| Order Writing | 1300 MB / s | 2600 MB / s | 3000 MB / s | ||
| Max SLC Cabinet Size | 45 GB | 122 GB | 160 GB | ||
| Random reading IOPS |
QD1 | 17k | |||
| QD32T16 | 230k | 400k | 500k | ||
| Random writing IOPS |
QD1 | 53k | 54k | ||
| QD32T16 | 320k | 470k | 480k | ||
| Force | Read | 3.7 W | 4.3 W | 4.5 W | |
| Write | 3.2 W | 4.2 W | 4.6 W | ||
| Idle | 45 mW | ||||
| Available (L1.2) | 5 mW | ||||
| Guarantee | 5 years | ||||
| Write endurance | 150 TB 0.3 DWPD |
300 TB 0.3 DWPD |
600 TB 0.3 DWPD |
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| MSRP | $ 49.99 (20 ¢ / GB) |
$ 69.99 (14 ¢ / GB) |
$ 129.99 (13 ¢ / GB) |
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The Samsung SSD 980 is built around its “Pablo” controller. It’s not actually a new NVMe controller, but it’s been shipped in the Samsung Portable SSD T7 family for over a year. This controller has half as many NAND channels as the controllers used in Samsung’s high-end NVMe drives (four rather than eight), and no DRAM interface. Using the high NAND IO speeds supported by recent generations of 3D NAND, the Pablo controller can saturate a PCIe 3.0 x4 host interface without requiring eight NAND channels.
For this generation, Samsung has decided to use different NAND in different capacities of the SSD 980 family. Our 1TB overview sample has Samsung’s 512Gbit 128-layer 3D TLC NAND, which is the same NAND found in the 2TB 980 PRO. Our 500 GB survey sample uses 256 Gbit NAND deaths, which means it has to use the same number of physical deaths. The mortality rate in the 500 GB unit helps alleviate the typical performance drops we would otherwise see from a lower-capacity drive, but the 256 Gbit NAND is Samsung’s older 92-layer TLC (as seen on the 970 EVO Plus), along with the 128-layer TLC we see in the 1TB model. Due to the number of deaths, the 500 GB model ends up close to the performance of the 1 TB model, but slightly slower due to the older NAND.
Mixing NAND like this in a product range is becoming increasingly common, especially for low SSDs where commodity margins may be tighter. It may also help explain why Samsung’s marketing materials for the SSD 980 refer to the 970 EVO as a predecessor, rather than the 970 ‘EVO Plus’. We’ve seen Samsung NAND generations mix with the 850 PRO and 850 EVO SATA SSDs before, but it was more of a simple transition during the middle of the production cycle rather than mixing from scratch. It will not be surprising to see that the smaller 980s eventually transition to 128L NAND, as Samsung’s factory output shifts, provided the SSD 980 stays on the market long enough and the performance levels can be level.
Updates with the SSD 980
With the SSD 980, Samsung has switched to a more aggressive SLC cache strategy, which more than triples the maximum size of the cache compared to the 970 EVO (Plus). They made a similar shift with the 980 PRO. This follows a general trend in the industry towards larger SLC caches, especially on QLC NVMe SSDs, which helps to improve the performance of many benchmarks and actual workload. While this is good for performance numbers in short burst tests, it usually costs performance when the case is full or the drive is full. For an entry-level drive that is not intended for heavy workstations, this is optimal.
Although it is a cheaper product than any of their previous NVMe SSDs, Samsung still gives the SSD 980 a five-year warranty with an endurance of 0.3 DWPD, the same as all their recent EVO level drives.
An important part of Samsung’s intention to achieve good real performance with the SSD 980 is the NVMe Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature, which we have thoroughly covered in the past. In short: the PCIe DMA features enable an NVMe SSD to efficiently access the CPU’s main memory / DRAM. With the NVMe memory buffer memory feature, the operating system can give the SSD a small amount of DRAM to use for the internal accounting of the SSD. Performance is not as good as having DRAM on the SSD itself, and the amount of memory allocated is usually quite small, standard is about 64 MB but up to 1 GB, but that is enough to get the performance on very real improve workload. .
Assuming that the Flash Translation Layer of the disk has a typical design, a 64 MB HMB is enough to store the logical to physical address allocations for about 64 GB of storage space in memory. It’s a very small amount of RAM, but 64 GB of storage is much more than typical consumer workloads require at the same time. The key part here is ‘in use’ – the HMB will only fill in (and expand) as data is used in the drive for that session. Although a top game is 250 GB to install, it can only use 50 GB to play at a certain level.
| NVMe host memory Buffer sizes |
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| Minimum | Default | |
| Samsung 980 | 16 MB | 64 MB |
| WD Blue SN550 | 3 MB | 32 MB |
| Mushkin Helix-L | 32 MB | 64 MB * |
| Toshiba RC100 | 10 MB | 38 MB |
The Samsung SSD 980 requests 64 MB of host ram for its HMB, but is willing to use as little as 16 MB. These values are similar to other DRAMless NVMe SSDs we have tested. For this review, we activated the synthetic criteria with HMB (the standard on recent operating systems) and disabled with HMB to illustrate its impact.
The exception is the Mushkin Helix-L with the Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller: we do not see any significant performance differences between HMB and HMB, not even on tests specifically designed to illustrate the effect of HMB, so it is reasonable clear that the firmware of the disk never gets the chance to use the 64MB he is asking for.
Samsung and entry level: the history
Historically, Samsung has given up on making true entry-level drives for the retail SSD market, preferring to maintain some premium status and maintain a more comfortable profit margin. This is a strategy that supports vertical integration very well.
Samsung has previously covered some low-end with the QLC QVO SATA SSDs. But even here, Samsung has kept a bit of premium pricing, so the main appeal was how affordable these drives are at the extremely large capacity. Samsung has not yet brought QLC NAND to their NVMe product range for consumers, so the other obvious formula for a low-power drive is to go DRAMless while sticking with TLC NAND.
The interruption of Samsung’s typical PRO / EVO / QVO distribution is not entirely without precedent: in the past there have been a few other occasions where Samsung needed an extra product level, leading to the 750 EVO and SSD 850 Since then, Samsung has added the QVO series of products, but the 980 does not qualify because it uses TLC NAND rather than QLC. Samsung also has no room to reduce any part of the model number, as there is no longer any gap between their 800-series SATA SSDs and the 900-series NVMs. So we sit with the regular 980, while Samsung keeps a place open for a better 980 EVO.
The competition
We could not review the WD Blue SN550 when it was launched at the end of 2019, but we got an example to include in this review, as the SN550 is the main competitor to the Samsung SSD 980. The earlier WD Blue SN500 was significantly raised the bar for DRAMless SSDs, and the SN550 improves it in almost every way. The Samsung SSD 980 has the highest performance on sequential and random IO, but for more real workload, the SN550 will not be as easy to beat. We also have results from the older Mushkin Helix-L, but with seemingly ineffective HMB support, it’s not nearly as competitive. Also in the low-end NVMe market segment, we have some QLC drives: the Corsair MP400 with the 8-channel Phison E12 controller and the Intel SSD 670p with the new Silicon Motion SM2265 controller.
In the more general TLC NVMe market segment, the SK hynix Gold P31 is the eye to watch. Like the Samsung SSD 980, it uses a four-channel controller, but the P31 has the usual full amount of DRAM on board which makes it a higher class drive. If Samsung releases a 980 EVO in the near future, it will be almost certain after the P31’s position in the market, although Samsung may also try a slight performance advantage by including PCIe gen4 support.
We also have results from several other recent Samsung SSDs in different market segments: the 870 EVO TLC SATA, 970 EVO Plus high-end PCIe Gen 3 and 980 PRO high-end PCIe Gen 4. The latter was tested again with updated firmware a few weeks ago ago, but we did not find any significant performance changes with our test package.