Samsung 980 PRO Review – DON’T BUY!

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I finally have one in my hands – Samsung’s new 980 PRO SSD their first PCIe Gen 4 drive, and honestly? It’s not as mind blowing as I hoped it would be. In fact, it’s bested by Sabrent’s new Rocket 4 Plus in almost every test. Lets run through them all, and see if it makes sense to pick one of these up at all. Of course, first if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Lets run down the specs first, like I said this is a PCIe Gen 4 drive based on Samsung’s own Elpis controller. It comes in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB sizes (although the 2TB model is still ‘TBC’) with the 250GB and 500GB drives having 512MB of DDR4 cache, the 1TB having 1GB, and 2TB with 2GB. The 1TB drive is the fastest rated, with 7GB/s reads and 5GB/s writes, although the 500GB drive I’ve got only loses 100MB/s on reads, whereas the 250GB drive only hits 2.7GB/s on writes and 6.4GB/s on reads. As with all PCIe Gen 4 SSDs, this will drop into any standard M.2 slot and work, even in PCIe Gen 3 boards, it just won’t run at Gen 4 speeds.

So that’s the spec, what about it’s actual performance? Well, that’s where is gets interesting. CrystalDiskMark reports my 500GB drive runs just below their claimed figures at roughly 6.8GB/s reads and 4.9GB/s writes. That’s not bad, although the ATTO results aren’t quite as impressive. Peaking at 4.56GB/s writes, and 6.33GB/s reads, that’s well below the quoted figures. Don’t get me wrong, 4.5GB/s writes and over 6GB/s reads is still mentally fast and more than pretty much anyone needs, but it’s not what they claimed and there are faster drives out already, like Sabrents newer Rocket 4 Plus.

Take a look at the graph of ATTO results, comparing this 980 PRO, the 970 EVO PLUS, and both the Sabrent Rocket 4, and 4 Plus. You can see at the top end, the Rocket 4 Plus reads at a good half a gig faster, and actually its write performance matches the Samsung’s drive READ. In writes, the 980 PRO runs over 1GB/s slower, matching the original Rocket 4.

If we take a closer look at the smaller block size results, the 980 PRO does have an ever so slight advantage here, but it’s not by much. It does also hold the lead in sequential, queue depth 1, thread 1, workloads like you can see in CrystalDiskMark compared to the new Rocket 4 Plus, with a consistent 700MB/s lead in both reads and writes.

I also like to run a file duplication test, stressing the controllers read and write performance simultaneously. It’s about 90GB of data, and a good result for a Gen 3 drive is around 1GB/s. The first wave of Gen 4 drives normally get 1.3-1.4GB/s, and the Rocket 4 Plus was hitting more like 1.6GB/s. The 980 Pro? That bounced between 1.4GB/s and 1.5GB/s. So, a hair better than the original Gen 4 drives, but not as fast as the newer ones using the Phison E18 controller.

And there’s one more surprise up it’s sleeve. Samsung makes use of an SLC cache on these drives to help reach these impressive speeds. The problem is the SLC space is pretty small. On this 500GB drive, it’s just 4GB of ‘Default’ space, and other 90GB of ‘Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0’ space, meaning once you write 94GB to the drive (in one go) you’ll get just 5GB/s reads, and 1GB/s writes, evident in the second half of the duplication test where it ran at more like 600MB/s, rather than the 1.5GB/s it was at before. The Sabrent drive wrote almost its entire capacity before slowing down.

Sadly, I’m not done yet. See when I was benchmarking the drive, I deliberately didn’t run it with a heatsink as it doesn’t come with one in the box, so seeing ‘stock’ performance is important. While running the synthetic benchmarks, the drive peaked at 74°c, only 1°c off the thermal throttling point. That means, unlike the Sabrent drive that managed to remain in the lower 70’s, you will definitely need this under a good heatsink, or with solid airflow to keep it operating at it’s best.

And finally, there is the warranty. Both the 980 PRO, and the Rocket 4 Plus, offer 5 year warranties, but there is a second figure they quote, much like car warranties “5 years or 100,000, whichever comes first”. With SSDs, it’s “5 years or 600TBW”. For the Samsung 1TB drive, it’s 600TBW, but for the Sabrent 1TB option, it’s 700. The 2TB Samsung is 1200TBW, Sabrent, 1400. How can Samsung be outmatched in EVERYTHING, including warranty, by a company that is just piecing together other peoples’ parts? No offense Sabrent.

I fear what has happened here is Samsung is too late to the game. If this drive came out right on the launch, it would have blown the rest out the water with it’s much more ‘true gen 4’ read speeds. But they weren’t prepared for the launch and took them another year to bring this to market, which in that time Phison made a second, more ‘true gen 4’ controller themselves and allowed people like Sabrent to bring more impressive drives to market (and for a lower price).

The obvious recommendation here is, don’t buy this. Not because it’s bad, it’s not, and not because you don’t need it, which you really don’t but still, don’t buy it because there are already better and cheaper options already on the market. If you do end up with one, it’s still an excellent drive that’s more than adequate for almost every use case, but if you have the choice, get the Rocket 4 Plus instead.