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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Luckz - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
At reasonable things like 4K random IOPS, the 1TB P31 seems to crush the 2TB Evo Plus.Notmyusualid - Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - link
@ Hifi.. - yes totally agree on the latency.That is why TODAY I just received my 1TB 970 Pro for my laptop. Even choosing it over the 980's... it was the Avg write latency table that sealed the deal for me. (See ATSB Heavy / Write)
My Toshiba X5GP 2TB (supposedly enterprise class ssd) is not able to keep up with the huge writes my system endures most days. My write performance drops by about 10x, and when I replay my data, there are clear drop-outs.
The loss of capacity will be a pain, but I'll push old data to the 2TB, as reads on that disk are normal, and if I need to work on a data set, I'll just have to pull it across to the 970 Pro again.
My 2c.
romrunning - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
What this review has done for me is to whet my appetite for an Optane drive. I'm looking forward to seeing how the new AlderStream Optane drives perform!viktorp - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Right here with you. Goodbye Samsung, nice knowing you.Will advise all my clients to stay away form Samsung for mission critical storage.
Wish we had a choice of selecting SLC, MLC, TLC, trading capacity for reliability, if desired.
_Rain - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
For the sake of your clients, please advice them to use enterprise drives for mission critical storage.Those Qvos, Evos and Pros are just client storage drives and not meant for anything critical.
and of course you can limit the drives capacity to lesser value in order to gain some spare endurance. For example quote 384GB on 512GB drive will definitely double your endurance.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
"please advice them to use enterprise drives for mission critical storage."does anyone, besides me of course, remember when STEC made 'the best enterprise' SSD? anybody even know about STEC? or any of the other niche 'enterprise' SSD vendors?
XabanakFanatik - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
It's almost like my comment on the previous article about the anandtech bench showing the 970 Pro is still faster due to the move to TLC were accurate.On the random, when the 980 beats the 970 pro it's by the smallest margin.
Samsung has really let the professionals like myself that bought pro series drives exclusively down.
Not to mention over 2 years later than the 970 Pro and it's marginally faster sometimes outside raw burst sequential read/write.
Jorgp2 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Don't all GPUs already decompress textures?And the consoles only have hardware compression to get the most out of their CPUs, same for their audio hardware, video decoders, and hardware scalers.
There's plenty of efficient software compression techniques, Windows 10 even added new ones that can be applied at the filesystem level. They have good compression, and very little overhead to decompress in real time.
Only downside is that it's a windows 10 feature, that means it's half baked. Setting the compression flag is ignored by windows, you have to compress manually every time.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
"Don't all GPUs already decompress textures?"Traditional lossy texture compression is closer to throwing data out at a fixed ratio than it is compression in the lossless sense. Compressed textures don't get compressed so much as texture units interpolate the missing data on the fly.
This is opposed to lossless compression, which is closer to ZIP file compression. No data is lost, but it has to be explicitly unpacked/decompressed before it can be used. Certain lossless algorithms work on compressed textures, so games store texture data with lossless compression to further keep the game install sizes down. The trade-off being that all of this data then needs uncompressed before the GPU can work on it, and that is a job traditionally done by the CPU.
jordanclock - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
This fast of a drive combined with DirectStorage has me very excited for this particular reason. Though, as I understand it, DirectStorage requires the game to explicitly call the API and thus needs to be built into the game, as opposed to a passive boost to every game.