The new Samsung 980 Pro SSD is likely to be released by the end of August. That's where all the best leaked information comes from, right? I mean, nothing you say on the internet without any corroboration can be reported as fact from anywhere.

But the possibility of an August launch is also consistent with what we've heard recently from our own sources: we were expecting to see Samsung's latest generation solid state drive, which was unveiled at CES in January, by now. Earlier in the year Samsung had indicated that more information about this drive would arrive in the second quarter, but we are rapidly approaching the end of that particular window.

The newly proposed release date comes from @UniverseIce (via HWBattle), a well-known source of other Samsung rumors, who claims it marks the arrival of "real PCIe 4.0 SSD ultra-high performance." The Samsung 980 Pro is the Korean giant's first consumer PCIe 4.0 SSD and promises better storage performance than any other product on the market today; at the Las Vegas show in January, it was announced at 6,500MB/s sequential read and 5,000MB/s write. [Currently, the only PCIe 4.0 show belongs to the Phison E16 controller, which is the same SSD storage silicon underlying nearly all Gen4 drives on the market today. in SSDs like the Sabrent Rocket and Addlink S90 have peak sequential read/write performance of 5,000 MB/sec and 4,400 MB/sec, respectively, putting them behind the upcoming Samsung drives.

Sammy SSD's Pro line of SSDs tend to utilize more expensive but faster proprietary 2-bit MLC NAND, coupled with the fact that everything can be 100% tuned by creating the controller silicon itself, the 980 Pro can be expected to top the best SSD performance list for some time to come for some time to come.

Well, until Phison announces its own new E18 controller later this year. As of the time I am writing this article, SSD manufacturers are working on their own firmware and drives, and Q3... or will be released to the market shortly after the 980 Pro.

In general, Samsung likes to release more mainstream-oriented EVO drives at a similar time to their Pro line of SSDs; EVO drives use 3-bit MLC (aka TLC) and are slightly slower in speed, but are much more affordable. These SSDs will likely offer higher performance than the current Phison drives, but will likely be priced similarly.

However, the upcoming Phison E18 controller is reportedly capable of providing up to 7,000 MB/s of throughput on a PCIe 4.0 interface, dangerously close to the theoretical limits of an M.2 x4 socket.

For what it's worth, the SSD built into the upcoming PS5 promises at least 5,500 MB/s of uncompressed throughput, though some workloads are expected to be able to achieve 9,000 MB/s using tricks of the compression algorithm. Early rumors indicated that Sony would use a 980 QVO SSD with 4-bit MLC.