The Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 SSD Review: A Spirit of Hope
by Billy Tallis on September 22, 2020 11:20 AM ESTNote: Our SSD testbed is currently producing suspiciously slow scores for The Destroyer, so those results have been omitted pending further investigation.
Note2: We are currently in the process of testing these benchmarks in PCIe 4.0 mode. Results will be added as they finish.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
The 250GB Samsung 980 PRO is a clear improvement across the board relative to the 970 EVO Plus. It still has some fairly high latency scores, especially for the full drive test run, but that's to be expected for this capacity class. The 1TB model seems to have sacrificed a bit of its full drive performance for in favor of a slight increase in empty-drive performance—the enlarged SLC caches are probably a contributing factor here.
Both drives show a significant reduction in energy usage compared to the older generation of Samsung M.2 NVMe drives, but there's still a ways to go before Samsung catches up to the most efficient 8-channel drives.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
The Samsung 980 PRO does not bring any significant improvements to performance on the Light test. Peak performance from most high-end NVMe drives is essentially the same, and the only meaningful differences are on the full-drive test runs. Aside from a relatively high 99th percentile write latency from the 250GB 980 PRO, neither capacity has any trouble with the full-drive test run.
Samsung has made significant improvements to energy efficiency with the 980 PRO. Samsung's previous generation of M.2 NVMe drives were among the most power-hungry in this segment, with their performance potential largely wasted on such a light workload. The 980 PRO cuts energy usage by a third compared to the 970 generation drives, bringing them more into competition with other high-end M.2 drives. But as with the Heavy test, there's still a lot of room for improvement as illustrated by drives like the WD Black SN750.
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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.