Samsung 980 pro makes its appearance with support for pcie 4.0

Samsung is present at CES 2020 where it has shared its new most advanced SSD to date, the Samsung 980 PRO M.2 NVMe. This appears to be Samsung's first end-customer SSD to support PCIe 4.0, which has so far only been implemented in its high-end enterprise drives.

Samsng 980 PRO - 6, 500 MB / s read and 5, 000 MB / s write

Since this is a simple preview rather than a formal announcement with a press release, information is largely limited for this unit, which means we're still a bit far from launch.

The exhibit only shows sequential performance numbers: 6500 MB / s read and 5000 MB / s write. This is a bit better than what we currently see with PCIe 4.0 units using the Phison E16 controller, but by the end of this year we should start to see the Phison E18 and other controllers that offer sequential speeds of around 7000 MB / s, so the 980 PRO may have little or no time to set performance records for the consumer SSD market.

Available capacities will range from 250GB to 1TB, which clearly indicates that Samsung is still using 2-bit MLC for the PRO line rather than switching to a 3-bit TLC NAND flash as the rest of the industry has done for its caps. of range.

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Samsung does not confirm which V-NAND memory generation this unit uses (probably 5th gen. 92L), nor do we have any details about the driver. We also don't have a timeline for retail availability. Samsung will share more information in the second quarter of this year. We will keep you informed.

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