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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msroadkill612 - Tuesday, October 13, 2020 - link
Yep. I find the raw sequential speeds exciting too - its not just about IOPS :)This processor load balancing coincides w/ some very handy advances in mainstream system memory - typically? 64GB (2x 32GB 3200 cl16 ~$220 atm) w/ speeds to ~45-50GB/s on AM4?,
a PCIE 4 GPU w/ a 32GB/s link vs the former 16GB/s. Its little mentioned, but seems an important plateau - ~64GB at 32GB/s seems a pretty usable supplemental tier of cache for the gpu?
quite possibly, nvme ports on the GPU's Infinity Fabric bus on ~BigNavi to bypass a potentially bottlenecked pcie bus - AMD did it before with a pro Vega card - an nvme raid array on the gpu.
individually they are increments in currently usable gaming memory & bandwidth (if not IOPS), but collectively they could be a force which affects gaming?
Games are what they are due to the restrictions of yore. Of course they are coded to isolate within gpu resources.. it was the only way to run fast enough. Reduce the restrictions tho, & add new usable resources, & games change to provide new & richer experiences.
MS FS is perhaps a forerunner of this new mindset - it likes massive memory, but is fun at 30FPS.
crabperson - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Thanks for the comparison to the PM1725a, I didn't realize how the lack of an SLC cache hurt it so much! I got a used 3.2 TB 'b version for a song, still holding out on Haswell here and probably won't upgrade until next year (Zen 3 may convince me otherwise).Looking forward to Phison's updated controllers and 2TB+ drives next year. Definitely don't need to waste money on the Pro line anymore.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
I was actually surprised how poorly the PM1725a fared on the consumer tests. I knew that the lack of SLC caching would hurt its writes, but it also appears to be heavily optimized for high queue depths at the expense of low queue depth performance.I'm planning to have some overlap between the enterprise and consumer synthetic benchmarks going forward, so there should be more opportunities to notice stuff like this.
ZeDestructor - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Any particular reson for not running the 3 desktop loads as well? I'm curious how the drives perform in more "real-world" desktop workloads tooBilly Tallis - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Time constraints, mostly. I grabbed the PM1725a because of its potential to show similar peak throughput, and it takes less than two hours to run the synthetic tests. A full set of ATSB results is a minimum of 12 hours plus however long it takes to fill the drive twice.ZeDestructor - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Couldn't you do it during downtime and then lump the results directly into bench? I'm not particularly fussed about having the results in this particular review, but they would be very nice to have around eventually™ for weirdos like me who buy used server drives for cheap and stick em into the desktop.PopinFRESH007 - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
The Rocket 4 Plus was already announced and should be shipping this year with what looks to be better performance than this. Will be interesting to see what the price will be. The E18 also supports NVMe 1.4 rather than 1.3c on the 980 Pro.ToTTenTranz - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
So.. is this a SSD that can go into the PS5 as expandable storage?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Probably. Sony hasn't put out their list of officially approved/tested SSDs yet, but this one should qualify and then some.UltraWide - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
The RANDOM R/W scores are average. It looks like the SK Hynix is a better SSD for real world use.