[Mini] Samsung 980 Pro arriving soon

[williamcll]

For information, the 980 Pro was shown in CES 2020, runs on PCIe 4.0 x4 and as a Read/Write speed of 6.5/5 GB/s. A Samsung spokesperson at that time said that information will be available in Q2, which has passed at this point. News regarding other 980 

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15352/ces-2020-samsung-980-pro-pcie-40-ssd-makes-an-appearance

Thoughts: 5 drives would be more than enough to fully populate a PCIe 4.0 X16 slot through the card Linus recently got, but I would imagine the price of this be as much as buying a top end graphics card.

[Dedayog]

Neat but barely news.  A next gen of SSD isn't a big deal. 

[GDRRiley]

22 minutes ago, Dedayog said:

Neat but barely news.  A next gen of SSD isn't a big deal. 

given that samsgun makes some of the fastest SSDs that have great long term reliability and consistent speeds its kinda a big deal.

 

now raid 0 of these for a media storage drive for some nice 6k or 8k raw or 4k proress 4444XQ thats the way to go and why these drives exist

[TrigrH]

inb4 these cost 50% more than the competing 4.0 drives.

[LAwLz]

57 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

inb4 these cost 50% more than the competing 4.0 drives.

I'm not that up to date with SSDs but last time I checked Samsung drives were pretty competitive in terms of pricing. At least when you took performance and reliability into account.

[GoldenLag]

1 hour ago, TrigrH said:

inb4 these cost 50% more than the competing 4.0 drives.

If they do, then they are well worth it considering current 2-bit MLC drives allready cost 50% more when looking at 3.0 2-bit MLC drives. 

 

 

Unless you dont need 2-bit MLC. In which case you are fine with TLC drives.

[TrigrH]

41 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I'm not that up to date with SSDs but last time I checked Samsung drives were pretty competitive in terms of pricing. At least when you took performance and reliability into account.

Samsungs sata drives are extremely competitve, however the NVME drives seem to carry a premium compared to its competitors. So I can only assume PCIE 4.0 will increase that further.

2 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

If they do, then they are well worth it considering current 2-bit MLC drives allready cost 50% more when looking at 3.0 2-bit MLC drives. 

 

Unless you dont need 2-bit MLC. In which case you are fine with TLC drives.

Samsung 980 Pro is an avoid product for most people (as the cost is nuts) it will be the EVO that we will need to see the pricing for.

[Soppro]

Nice. It'll significantly outperform Phison E16 drives, but by the time this launches there will be E18 drives on the horizon too

[3rrant]

Nice bandwidth but.. IOPs performance?

I've been super happy with Samsung SSDs over the last few years  but they do cost quite more than the competitors as well.

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

I'm not that up to date with SSDs but last time I checked Samsung drives were pretty competitive in terms of pricing. At least when you took performance and reliability into account.

Excluding their QVO range. Those SSD aren't priced low enough compared to TLC SSD (write endurance is a non issue - it's better than some 2014-2015 TLC SSD *looks at OCZ/Toshiba*).

[GoldenLag]

50 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

Samsung 980 Pro is an avoid product for most people (as the cost is nuts) it will be the EVO that we will need to see the pricing for.

Pro is more of a compelling product compared to the Evo lineup. 

 

As you can get other offerings that perform similarly compared to the Evos, but cost a lot less. 

 

The Pros offer something that really cant be had with other drives, the Evos doesnt. 

[LAwLz]

57 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

Samsungs sata drives are extremely competitve, however the NVME drives seem to carry a premium compared to its competitors. So I can only assume PCIE 4.0 will increase that further.

27 minutes ago, 3rrant said:

I've been super happy with Samsung SSDs over the last few years  but they do cost quite more than the competitors as well.

Are they really that much more expensive?

 

Sure they are very expensive. I mean, the Pro model is very expensive even compared to Samsung's own EVO model, but the performance is really, really good.

[RejZoR]

These come in 4TB version? Annoying thing about M.2 format drives is they lag in capacity so badly most of the time. Ages ago when I wanted 2TB SSD, only one available was as SATA. Wanted a 4TB M.2 recently and again M.2's only came in 2TB flavors. Ugh.

[3rrant]

5 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Are they really that much more expensive?

 

Sure they are very expensive. I mean, the Pro model is very expensive even compared to Samsung's own EVO model, but the performance is really, really good.

In my region a 860 EVO at the start of 2018 was 320€ for 1TB, the PRO was 500-600€

In 2019 the same drives went to 160€ EVO and 300€ PRO model

 

So it's pretty much a 80-100% price increase for the PRO model. Big difference is in endurance rating not speed however, speed difference isn't much between the two.

 

Considering current pricing and same difference, the 980 PRO will cost a crapton.

[williamcll]

7 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

These come in 4TB version? Annoying thing about M.2 format drives is they lag in capacity so badly most of the time. Ages ago when I wanted 2TB SSD, only one available was as SATA. Wanted a 4TB M.2 recently and again M.2's only came in 2TB flavors. Ugh.

As far as I know it's only up to 1TB.

[GoldenLag]

10 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Wanted a 4TB M.2 recently and again M.2's only came in 2TB flavors. Ugh.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/r3RgXL/sabrent-rocket-4-tb-m2-2280-nvme-solid-state-drive-sb-rocket-4tb

 

There is 1 drive that does that i found on PCPP. 

 

Does it come at a good price? No

[RejZoR]

Just now, GoldenLag said:

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/r3RgXL/sabrent-rocket-4-tb-m2-2280-nvme-solid-state-drive-sb-rocket-4tb

 

There is 1 drive that does that i found on PCPP. 

 

Does it come at a good price? No

It's not really that expensive for a fast NVMe 4TB SSD. It's basically how much I paid for the 2TB drive back in the day. And it's still only SATA... I'm kinda Samsung biased when it comes to SSD's though, although I heard about Sabrent and it seems to have a good reputation.

[GDRRiley]

44 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

Excluding their QVO range. Those SSD aren't priced low enough compared to TLC SSD (write endurance is a non issue - it's better than some 2014-2015 TLC SSD *looks at OCZ/Toshiba*).

I look at this way given I see Samsung pro SATA drives as another option to most of the really expensive SSDs used to record high res/high framerate video. their M.2 are good for editors scratch disk as those end up being a t2 to ram and you don't want that slow.

 

I can save between 50-150$ on 2tb drives or 50-100$ on 1tb drive. over sonys or Angelbird for external recorders

[ThreePinkApples]

Quote

A Samsung spokesperson at that time said that information will be available in Q2, which has passed at this point.

We're still in Q2 though, June is the last month of Q2.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, TrigrH said:

Samsungs sata drives are extremely competitve, however the NVME drives seem to carry a premium compared to its competitors. So I can only assume PCIE 4.0 will increase that further.

A lot of NVMe SSDs rely/hide behind DRAM cache and SLC cache where as Samsung NVMe SSDs actually have good controllers and high quality high performance NAND flash chips and won't nose dive in performance if you sustain a load or actually have really demanding I/O loads.

 

You can easily engineer an SSD to have the highest performance in typical benchmark software but in reality be inferior in performance in real life and worse can be less reliable since it's designed to benchmark well but no actually be at the reliability standard you would expect of that performance.

 

Samsung also uses the same DRAM and NAND flash chips on their consumer SSDs as their enterprise ones and the only real difference is slightly modified/optimized controller chips (based on the same common standard), power loss protection and more physical NAND flash reserved (over-provisioning) for reliability in performance and lifespan.

 

If you buy Samsung you are always getting a quality product with solid engineering focusing on real outcomes. Seek out the enterprise SSD reviews and you'll see just how vastly different the testing methodology is, major one being the device is brought in to a stabilized state by writing to it until all caching and leveling is exhausted and you are getting true performance figures. Not so important for consumer workloads and testing but this type of testing exposes the real performance of the SSD, if you can find consumer SSDs tested this way is really interesting to see but few outside of Samsung get put through that kind of testing because Samsung is one of the few consumer SSDs you would actually try and get away with using in a server if you need to go on the cheap.

 

Pro actually means Pro when Samsung uses it, not a gimmick but neither is Pro actually enterprise/server rated it just happens to actually be as good as some that are (minus power loss protection).

[Loote]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

These come in 4TB version? Annoying thing about M.2 format drives is they lag in capacity so badly most of the time. Ages ago when I wanted 2TB SSD, only one available was as SATA. Wanted a 4TB M.2 recently and again M.2's only came in 2TB flavors. Ugh.

It is not that they lag as much as they are just smaller, I've seen m2 with 4 memory chips at most and 2.5' SATA drives with 8, I think you could even put chips on two sides of a 2.5' drive if you really wanted. That means m2 drives will always have lower maximum capacity and MLC are also smaller than TLC(or QLC). From time to time there is a new chip with increased capacity, that's when you get bigger drives.

 

With PCIE 5 coming and it being hard to tell the difference between SATA and nvme SSDs anyway, I wonder if we'll stop at some point and be satisfied with some number of GB/s(not forever, just for a while)

[GoldenLag]

55 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I'm kinda Samsung biased when it comes to SSD's though, although I heard about Sabrent and it seems to have a good reputation.

Its a phison E12 controller. 

 

Its essentially what most other manufacturers use for their high-ish end NVMe drives. 

 

Same one as the MP510 from Corsair (which is one of the few you can find benchmark off for comparison)

[GoldenLag]

10 minutes ago, leadeater said:

lot of NVMe SSDs rely/hide behind DRAM cache and SLC cache where as Samsung NVMe SSDs actually have good controllers and high quality high performance NAND flash chips and won't nose dive in performance if you sustain a load or actually have really demanding I/O loads.

Might be missunderstand some of the point here, but samsung drives also rely on dram cache and SLC cache to achieve the write speed that are rated. 

 

They do nosedrop in sustained write performance once the SLC cache runs out. The Pro drives nosedive less as they use 2-bit MLC. Which allow them to hold a higher speed compared to Evos and other TLC based drives. 

 

They certainly use really good controllers tho. 

 

Edit: had to doublecheck. Seems that the 2-bit MLC 970 pro drives do not have a nosedive. Thats my bad

[leadeater]

8 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

Might be missunderstand some of the point here, but samsung drives also rely on dram cache and SLC cache to achieve the write speed that are rated. 

No, as in the performance you see on the box has no relation to the actual speed and quality of the product because the controller firmware used is designed to make use of the DRAM cache as much as possible for as long as possible (duration of typical benchmarks) so you really have no idea how well the SSD actually performs. You might as well just be testing system memory to see how fast your SSD is.

 

Edit:

And I'm not saying that this actually makes Samsung SSD better for consumer workloads or the other ones that do that aren't good, it's just that unless you know about this you might buy the wrong thing in a more Pro/Semi-Pro workload where it would actually make a difference. Don't go buying a Samsung Pro SSD for game storage, actually is a waste of money and may actually be slower than these peaky designed ones for that.

[GoldenLag]

8 minutes ago, leadeater said:

-snip-

Ah so you are reffering to that short benchmarks. 

 

Added a edit as i doublechecked pro drives from samsung to see if they utilized SLC cache in a notable manner. Which they didnt. 

 

For some reason i thought it dropped to around 1200mb/s. My bad. 

 

And yeah, the box numbers are fairly missrepresenting on how good the perfomance is. 

 

Edit: i was really only commenting in regards to Samsung using the same techniques to achieve high burst performance. As they havent (for the most part) only used good controllers and flash to avoid the dropp after running out of SLC.