Ever since Samsung's 980 Pro SSD was unveiled at CES in January, we've been eagerly awaiting its launch; as discovered by TechPowerUp, Samsung published the product page for the 980 Pro series and then took it offline.

Redoing on the web rarely works, and the cached copy of the 980 Pro product page highlights this fact: since its unveiling at CES, it has become clear that Samsung was able to increase the speed of its already super-fast SSDs a bit. According to this list, sequential write performance is up to 7,000 MB/sec (previously 6,500 MB/sec) and sequential write performance is up to 5,000 MB/sec.

Of course, to approach these top speeds requires a PCI Express 4.0 platform, and for now there are only two to choose from: the AMD-X570 and B550. Intel has yet to adopt PCIe 4.0, and AMD's entry-level A520 chipset sticks to PCIe 3.0.

Even without a motherboard that supports PCIe 4.0, these drives can be made to work, but they will not reach their maximum rated speeds. Also, for gaming applications, it is not as important, at least not at this time. For gaming, a 2.5" SATA SSD is capped at about 580 MB/sec, and games load just as fast.

This could change when the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 arrive later this year. Microsoft and Sony are touting the benefits, such as games loading almost instantly and virtually eliminating in-game transitions.

In theory, the inclusion of SSDs in both next-generation consoles should motivate game developers to take advantage of faster storage, and the benefits should trickle down to the PC arena. However, that is still some way off.

As for the 980 Pro comparison, the SSD in the Xbox Series X is rated for up to 2,400 MB/sec and the SSD in the PS5 for 5,500 MB/sec read speed. However, this is an evaluation when uncompressed. With compression, the same SSDs are said to deliver up to 4,800 MB/sec and 9,000 MB/sec, respectively, depending on the workload. This is a point to note.

The 980 Pro will be offered in 1TB, 500GB, and 250GB capacities. Since these drives have not yet been officially launched, there is no information on pricing yet.