Samsung 980 PRO Review - Samsung's First PCIe Gen4 SSD

samsung is finally launching their 980 pro ssd which is their very first pci gen 4 ssd and it is supposed to be the fastest consumer prosumer ssd on the market and i know that many of you have been waiting for this one for a while now because so far as you probably know pcie gen 4 ssds haven't really been worth buying they would really show great results in some benchmarks but in others they weren't really better than gen 3 ssds that would cost you way less so i as everybody else as well set my hopes up on samsung to come out with a gen 4 ssd that would destroy the competition and would be the overall best ssd that you can buy no matter the cost and if you look at their track record actually it wasn't an unrealistic expectation in my opinion but there's still many things that we need to talk about today and coming from a long time samsung ssd user i really do hope that they take this review as a healthy feedback rather than a negative thing because it's not a bad ssd it is just a complicated one so if we look back a bit these pro drives were loved by pc enthusiasts everywhere who are willing to pay a bit more for the fastest highest quality drive on the market and both 960 pro and the 970 pro were basically the fastest ssds when they launched and they had some of the best durability statistics as well but a lot has changed for this 980 pro so let's talk about all the upsides of these new drives and all the downsides that you really need to know before you decide to get one for yourself let's go this video is brought to you by gigabyte and their g32qc gaming monitor this 32-inch monitor with a curved v8 panel quad hd resolution and 165 hertz refresh rate is pretty fast and great for gaming it supports g-sync and freesync and also comes with an excellent image quality thanks to its exceptional contrast and brightness and did i mention it's also pretty affordable now check it out using the links in the description below they are launching three capacities today gigabytes 500 gigabytes and one terabyte and i have all three of them here and there is supposed to be a two terabyte model for sale later this year eu pricing is 250 euros for the one terabyte model 169 euros for the 500 gigabyte model and 99 euros for the 251 and it should be pretty similar for the us as well but that in dollars of course now that actually makes them a little bit cheaper than the 970 pro but still considerably more expensive than most other nvme drives on the market now i know it's only a minor detail but i do appreciate samsung making ssds that actually look good if you're going to make a pretty build with every part matching you really don't want a blue pcb ssd in there so just like with the previous samsung ssds this one is very easy on the eyes now all the components of the ssd are on the top side so if you have a motherboard with a heatsink that will cool all the parts and not cause any parts on the bottom to overheat and that is pretty important because if you have an ssd that is writing gigabytes of data every single second without stopping it will cause some serious heat so you really want to have either an m.2 heat spreader or you really need to make sure that it has some airflow in your system to stop it from throttling under those extreme workloads now one thing you will have to do before you actually start using this drive is to make sure that it is set to performance mode in windows and that fright caching is actually enabled it will only take a few seconds of your time and to be honest it is something that you should do for most ssds now on their previous drive so samsung used their own nvme driver that will do all that for you and i think a simple driver like that is just so much easier for most users and it will avoid at least a couple of complaints from people wondering you know why their brand new pro drive isn't performing as fast as it is supposed to so i'm not really on board with removing this feature for this brand new drive it just feels like a step backwards in my opinion but the biggest change that a lot of people were actually upset over is dropping the 2-bit mlc memory from the pro series and using a 3-bit memory like majority of mainstream ssds or even entry-level ones would have now more bits of data per cell means that ssds wear out faster and it is slower especially when you start to really stress the drive so why do brands choose to do it because it is cheaper you simply need to put fewer memory cells to get the same amount of storage so it is a cost saving measure in a way and pretty much a part of the reason this 980 pro is actually cheaper than the previous 970 pro now samsung is claiming that their current generation of memory is actually faster and more reliable than previous generations but they're not really backing that claim up with warranty now like most samsung drives so far these do come with a five year long warranty but every ssd also has a limit of how much data you can write to it before the warranty expires even if it's within those five years you lose the warranty on the 980 pro if you write more than 600 terabytes of data on the one terabyte drive or even less on smaller drives that's the same amount as on the 970 evo plus but only half as much as on the 970 pro and that kind of caused a lot of negative feedback of course now their response to that is that 99 of nvme owners don't even write 150 terabytes in five years so it really won't be a big deal for most users but while that might be completely true it is still a downgrade and they're not doing anything to really cushion the blow the best thing any brand can do to show that they believe in their own product is to support it with warranty and even though the 980 pro is cheaper than the 970 pro it is still an expensive drive so i would argue that these drives are made for those one percent of users that actually really use their ssds heavily and samsung shouldn't really give them any reasons to doubt the pro status of this drive previous gen 4 ssds were all based on the same fison controller and while they showed good results in some benchmarks they really struggled to show real world benefits now samsung sticks with its own controller and with its own memory chips and it does manage to show some really impressive read and write speeds the one terabyte and a 500 gigabyte version even right a bit faster than samsung's own claim of 5 000 megabytes per second and the 250 gigabyte version falls behind in right performance but i am going to assume here that you're considering a 500 gigabyte or a one terabyte version anyways they're both significantly faster than other gen 4 ssds and even managed to read data faster than four auras and miami ssds in raid if you're a creator copying your video files over a 10 gigabit lan this is seriously fast or at least it is seriously fast for the first 100 or so gigabytes because after that you will pass the limits of samsung's turbo ride buffer and drop to around 2000 megabytes on the one terabyte model or a bit less on the smaller capacities now this happens to most drives so it's generally not a big worry but on the 970 pro for example it didn't which kept around 2 800 megabytes per second stable with no issues thanks to the 2-bit mlc memory and not relying on caching as much overall the 980 pro will be faster but most of the time not always so just like earlier then 4 ssds being faster in some benchmarks doesn't really mean the 980 pro shows any real benefit in games or even most creative applications game loading times were within milliseconds of each other even if you compare a good sata drive like the 860 evo to an nvme drive like the 970 evo so you shouldn't have expected this 980 to feel any different but creative applications like photoshop or like premiere for example don't really load faster either or offer a smoother workflow using the 980 pro instead of the 970 pro or evo that i'm actually using in my own editing system and we can see that in the graphs as well 4k read and writes in atto benchmark don't really look different from fast gen 3 drives and in the very well balanced pc mark 8 storage test which includes several heavy gaming and productivity benchmarks the 980 pro doesn't manage to stand out at all it performs really well and in video editing you will quickly benefit from a fast nvme drive over a simple sata drive but between the 980 pro and the 970 evo plus for example you won't really notice a big difference now if you set some really intense and complicated workloads using an application like io meter you will be able to show differences between these drives but not really in a real world application there is a little bit of hope on the horizon for gen 4 ssds in general now new technologies like microsoft direct storage and nvidia rtx io are meant to really improve the way applications can use faster nvme storage like this and in theory future games and applications will be able to load data much faster as long as you have a really fast drive like this one but we are talking about the future here not about the situation right now now microsoft is saying that developers will get early versions of the tools required next year so i guess it will be probably 2022 by the time we even see the first possible results of that now the fact that the 980 pro is backwards compatible is just great so you know you can use it on your gen 3 intel system right now and then benefit from higher speeds when you upgrade in a year or two but to be honest when was the last time it was really worth future proofing your system for something you might benefit from two years from now so with all those things combined this ssd is in a bit of a rough position so let's start with the good things if you're looking to get a gen 4 drive to prepare yourself for the future or you have an actual workflow that really benefits from insane read and write speeds this is the fastest gen 4 ssd you can currently buy so do get yourself a one terabyte or two terabyte version and you know just sit back and enjoy the ridiculous speeds and knowing samsung and their prices they usually actually drop below their msrps pretty quickly so the price premium over the 970 evo plus which is still one of the best all-around ssds out there will probably not be that bad but there are a lot of concerns here as well and the main one is that the gen 4 ssds in general just don't offer any real benefits to most users just yet while still being more expensive and this isn't really samsung's fault that goes for all gen 4 ssds out there so it is definitely worth asking yourself if you will actually benefit from a gen 4 drive over a more affordable nvme ssd but the biggest issue in my opinion is that samsung made some choices that take away from that well-known pro name like dropping 2-bit mlc memory for 3-bet 1 and relying on slc caching to keep performance up so it would be very fast but it will drop quite a bit if you write a lot of data at once which is something that the previous 970 pro didn't do and on top of that the tbw warranty is half of the one you get on the 970 pro the lack of a driver is a minor issue that you can fix yourself but again not having to go into your window settings to get optimal performance was also part of that samsung pro experience that kind of justified its higher price as well now i know the 970 pro is very expensive and the 980 pro is faster in most ways and comes in at a lower price and that's all great but i think that if you ask a significant price premium for a premium product at least make sure that the price is the only real downside worth talking about now that is it for today thank you so much for watching let me know in the comments down below what do you think about this new 980 pro and while you're there give me a like and subscribe to this channel to never miss an upload bye guys you

Channel: Techtesters

Views: 331,228

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Id: BGe5GTk9z7Y

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020