Expectations for the Samsung 980 Pro are incredibly high. Samsung has long been a leading brand in premium SSDs, and the Samsung 970 Pro and Evo series are still regarded as some of the best SSDs you can buy for PCIe 3.0 storage. However, the world is shifting, and the rise of PCIe 4.0 means that the once strong throughput numbers of the 970 series are starting to look a bit mediocre.

The Samsung 980 Pro's sales pitch is that it offers twice the performance of PCIe 3.0 drives and is up to 12 times faster than SATA SSDs. That in itself is great, but Samsung is not the only one that matters; Sabrent, Addlink, Gigabyte, Corsair, Silicon Power, and others have been offering PCIe 4.0 drives for some time, all at very competitive prices. [All of these manufacturers are built around the Phison E16 controller, which is capable of up to 5,000 MB/s and 4,400 MB/s read and write, respectively. This is a far cry from the maximum potential throughput of 8,000 MB/sec for PCIe sockets.

Against this backdrop, the Samsung 980 Pro's sequential figures of 7,000MB/sec and 5,000MB/sec look good, and indeed these figures alone may be enough to convince certain users with specific use cases to pick up the 980 Pro and forget about other drive technologies and features It could be persuasive enough to make certain users with specific use cases pick up the 980 Pro and forget about other drive technologies and features. [However, sequential throughput is only a small part of the SSD story, and what really matters in day-to-day tasks is moving smaller files and essential random access demands. The good news is that Samsung is improving on this front as well. [Samsung boasts 1,000K IOPS in random read/write on the QD32, significantly better than any of the aforementioned drives. It is worth noting that these figures are for a 1TB drive, and the 500GB drive presented here has a slightly lower sequential read of 6,900MB/s and a lower IOPS of 800K. [The Samsung 980 Pro is the first of Samsung's new Elpis controllers, capable of handling 128 I/O queues simultaneously. Samsung has also moved to 6th generation V-NAND flash, which has about 40% more cells than the previous generation, 10% faster reads and writes, and at the same time consumes less power.

The 980 Pro also uses Samsung's Intelligent Turbo Write 2.0, which has a five times larger buffer than the previous generation (90GB versus 22GB), allowing the drive to achieve write speeds of 5,000MB/s. Once the intelligent buffer is exhausted, the drive's performance drops to 1,000 MB/sec and 2,000 MB/sec on the 1TB model. This 500GB drive has 512MB of LPDDR4 that acts as a cache to help maintain high speeds.

Samsung previously divided its SSDs into Pro and Evo brands, using underlying technology as a differentiator between the two. For example, the 970 Pro used 2-bit MLC, while the Evo used 3-bit MLC (TLC) NAND flash. With the release of this drive, the lineup changed, with the Pro being "high performance," the Evo being for mainstream users, and the QVO-branded drives being for users with limited budgets. The 980 Pro, incidentally, uses 3-bit MLC flash.

There is one somewhat unimpressive number on the 980 Pro's spec sheet, and that is 300 TB of Total Bytes Written, and while it is nice that a 5-year warranty is a standard feature across the market, this 300 TB translates to 168 GB per day over a 5-year period, which is certainly covered under normal use. That would certainly cover normal use, but given that Sabrent's Rocket PCIe 4.0 drive offers 850 TBW, one has to have confidence in Sabrent's drive.

It is worth taking a moment to commend Samsung on its Magician software. While perhaps a minor point, Samung's Drive Companion looks good, is full of information about the health of the drive, and includes benchmarks to make it easy to see if the drive is performing as intended.

You can also set your own over-provisioning level (default is 10% of drive capacity) and securely erase or encrypt the drive as needed. This is the best SSD software that exists today.

Next, on to the performance offered: the ATTO Disk Benchmark showed the best scenario for sequential reads and writes, and the Samsung 980 Pro scored some easy wins at the start of the test suite. New drives from Adata and Sablent may be available soon, but at this point, this is one of the fastest SSDs available for purchase. Indeed, the difference is more pronounced when it comes to reads, but Samsung still leads when it comes to writes. [While the Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 drive and Silicon Power US70 are not far behind in write tests, the same can be said for the AS SSD benchmark, which uses uncompressible data for testing. Turning to the 4K performance of the AS SSD, these drives higher numbers.

The performance drops off a bit in the real-world benchmarks, though this depends on the test you are looking at. When transferring 30GB of various files across the entire drive, the 980 Pro showed a solid 2:19 minutes, but it's not the fastest PCIe 4.0 drive we've recently examined.

In PCMark 10 storage tests, Samsung reclaimed the crown, thanks in part to the fast access times of its new V-NAND flash memory. In the quick test, it narrowly edged out other PCIe 4.0 drives, but in the full test, it claimed a decisive victory with an average bandwidth of 424 MB/sec, well above its nearest rival.

The final test is the Final Fantasy XIV: Shadow Bringers benchmark, which tests not only graphics performance but also section load times. Here, the Samsung 980 Pro performed well, taking 9.902 seconds to load all levels, which is slightly slower than the 9.877 seconds of the Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4.0 drive and the 9.705 seconds of the Silicon Power US70

Both of these drives are also very fast.

Both are fast enough that we cannot really see and distinguish between them, but they do show that with current game coding methods, it is difficult to tell one PCIe 4.0 drive from the other.

However, there is an important point to be made here. That is how games use SSDs. Currently, they cannot take full advantage of the performance offered, but with the release of next generation consoles and the introduction of Microsoft DirectStorage (and Nvidia's RTX I/O), this will change. It is not certain what kind of storage will be the winner, but in any case, games should load faster, be more responsive, and make better use of the machine's hardware.

At this point, however, there is not much that will substantially detract from PCIe 4.0 drives.

The Samsung 980 Pro is a quality drive that moves NVMe SSDs forward, but it is not the knockout drive that many had hoped or indeed expected. Headline sequential reads and writes have always been good, but I expected them to be backed up by a significant change in overall performance. A better drive in most respects, to be sure, but not the knockout blow needed to end the game here and now.

The big problem with the Samsung 980 Pro is its value proposition. While it is certainly one of the fastest drives, it doesn't win every benchmark, and when it comes to real-world performance, its lead over the competition is marginal. Paying more for more performance is fine, but paying more for a slight upgrade doesn't make much sense.

At 30 cents per gigabyte, this 500GB drive is one of the more expensive SSDs you can buy; the $229 1TB model offers better performance and value for money at 23 cents per gigabyte.