Samsung unveils 980 Pro SSD with PCI-E 4.0 interface and TLC-NAND officially

Samsung has officially announced its 980 Pro SSDs. This is the company’s first consumer SSD with PCI-E 4.0 interface. According to the manufacturer, the 980 Pro achieves sequential read speeds of up to 7GB / s, depending on the chosen model.

The 980 Pro will be available in variants with 250GB, 500GB and 1TB storage capacity. Samsung already showed its 980 Pro SSDs at the CES in January, but the company did not share much details at the time. In January, the company spoke of sequential read speeds of up to 6.5 GB / s, which has now been increased to a maximum of 7 GB / s for the 1 TB variant. The variants with 250GB and 500GB storage capacity achieve slower speeds. The arbitrary 4KB read and write speeds of the 1TB variant amount to a maximum of one million iops, according to Samsung.

The 980 Pro SSDs are equipped with tlc-nand. Previous Samsung SSDs in the Pro series were usually built from mlc-nand. The new m2 SSDs use a new controller, which the manufacturer calls Elpis. Samsung further advertises one total bytes written-Lifespan of 600 terabytes written for the 980 Pro 1TB. That’s half of its predecessor, the 970 Pro 1TB, which had a written endurance of 1,200 terabytes. The 980 Pro series comes with a 5-year manufacturer’s warranty, just like its predecessor.

Samsung has not yet announced official release dates for the 980 Pro SSDs. The drives are already in the Pricewatch, but are not yet available. The 250GB variant currently costs € 72.90 there and the 500GB model will be available for € 116. The 980 Pro 1TB costs € 159.