Samsung 980 PRO NVMe SSD Uses TLC NAND Flash with Half the Endurance of 970 PRO: Product Page

[Vayra86]

This will only get worse. Scarce product is scarce, and this is what you get.

It really was better in the old days, I think we will be saying that a lot in tech in the near future.

 

[Breit]

Anything on price?
Maybe the Samsung PM1733 is the better option at this point...
These are available in 2/4/8/16 TB sizes and have rated endurances of 3.5/7/14/28 PB.

The 2TB version is available for ~530€, 4TB is ~890€ (in Germany, including taxes). For a fast and long-lasting PCIe4 SSD this sounds reasonable.

 

[Space Lynx]

Sabrent does it again: Rocket 4 Plus SSD packs insane 7GB/sec reads

Sabrent's new Rocket 4 Plus has insane speeds of 6.85GB/sec reads, available in 500GB, 1TB, and even a huge 2TB if you need space.

www.tweaktown.com

sabrent has matching competition now. nice, i will probably just get the sabrent and save the $100 samsung name fee.

 

[bug]

That’s very sneaky of Samsung to call it 3bit MLC. I saw the specs earlier on another site, but thought it’s a typo. If it’s not real MLC, then what is so Pro about this? The Pro vs Evo series used to be segregated by MLC vs TLC.

And now it's going to be TLC vs QLC. Sadly.

But seriously, has no one seen this coming? The only way NAND has scaled since its inception was added levels. And adding levels suffers big time from diminishing returns. Improved fab process is not really an answer, everybody seems to be strapped for capacity these days.

 

[ExcuseMeWtf]

That's a wake-up call to buy MLC drives while they're still around...

 

[Space Lynx]

That's a wake-up call to buy MLC drives while they're still around...

your average gamer user is just fine with TLC... been using a 2tb TLC ssd for many years now and have had 0 issues meh

 

[ExcuseMeWtf]

your average gamer user is just fine with TLC... been using a 2tb TLC ssd for many years now and have had 0 issues meh

For YOUR usage patterns it might be fine. I don't know you, maybe even QLC is fine for you lmao.

Personally, would prefer sth with a bit more longevity, got 8 years out of Crucial M4 64GB for my usage patterns.

Got one of the last Transcend SSD370s 512GB samples, and given above, expect over a decade from it.

Doubt I'd pull out as much from TLC based one, let alone QLC.

Not to mention these are supposed to be PRO drives, with supposedly superior performance and longevity.

And yet we get half the TBW of 970 PRO at respective capacities.

For less demanding use there is still EVO series...

 

[BSim500]

your average gamer user is just fine with TLC... been using a 2tb TLC ssd for many years now and have had 0 issues meh

Gamers may not need MLC but write-heavy stuff like video / audio editing though is a different story. "ExcuseMeWtf" has it right - if you know why you need MLC, then the time to grab one is now before Samsung devalues the range into "new PRO = old EVO".

 

[bug]

your average gamer user is just fine with TLC... been using a 2tb TLC ssd for many years now and have had 0 issues meh

The problem is up until now you could buy TLC for cheap and spend extra $$$ to get MLC. That won't be an option for much longer. Hopefully QLC matures enough by the time this happens, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[$ReaPeR$]

Boy am I glad I got the 970 pro. this really shouldn't be in the pro line.

 

[bug]

Boy am I glad I got the 970 pro. this really shouldn't be in the pro line.

There's nothing "pro" about these. The professional drives are the enterprise ones.

 

[R-T-B]

Gamers may not need MLC but write-heavy stuff like video / audio editing though is a different story. "ExcuseMeWtf" has it right - if you know why you need MLC, then the time to grab one is now before Samsung devalues the range into "new PRO = old EVO".

I agree if you really need it, but I'd be willing to bet well over 90% of those who think they need it don't, frankly.

Still, always disheartening to see a downgrade like this.

 

[AsRock]

600 TBW is low.

The Corsair MP600 1TB drive i'm using is 1,800 TBW and also uses TLC with Phison E16.

Now i'm curious to see what the updated Phison E18 will do which I believe comes out towards the end of the year.

Still not over Phison personally, the only SSD that failed me ( i been buying SSD since SATA2 ) and the other from TG who did the Dark decided to stop the PC from booting one day, how ever the drive work in another PC and required to be formatted to work in the original PC.

This will only get worse. Scarce product is scarce, and this is what you get.

It really was better in the old days, I think we will be saying that a lot in tech in the near future.

Yeah i enjoyed paying $480 for 2 80GB SSD's .

 

[lexluthermiester]

I agree if you really need it, but I'd be willing to bet well over 90% of those who think they need it don't, frankly.

I expect my drives to still work 10, 15 and 20 years(or more) down the line just like normal HDD's. TLC might make that, MLC very likely. QLC? Never gonna happen. Given the wear leveling on drives I've had a chance to conduct tests on, QLC will be lucky to last 30 months before they degrade to the point of being useless. QLC in a boot drive is unacceptable.

TLC on professional focused products is dubious. MLC and SLC are the only types that have the durability to qualify being in professional tier products. This will be a different story if there has been an advance in NAND chemistry or some other advance that make TLC more durable.

 

[evolucion8]

Maybe we'll finally see a PCIe 4.0 NVMe that isn't basically a dressed-up SATA drive. Even if it's TLC.

Not true, the difference is the interface and usually the controller makes a very good job ensuring it can go much faster than a SATA that can bottleneck almost every SSD out there.

 

[ssdpro]

You just furnished a link to their Singaporean site, in English.

That would be because the site referenced in this article is now redirecting and inaccessible.

Perhaps they will drop the public-facing 3-bit spec as they got trashed on every tech site for using TLC in a Pro product. From the beginnings of SSD tech there was SLC, MLC, then came TLC and QLC. MLC meant 2-bit to the market and of course multi- is indeed applicable to TLC (triple) and QLC (quad). With the stank surrounding the more specific TLC it is no wonder they didn't want to describe it that precisely and try using MLC with an asterisk.

 

[Makaveli]

Still not over Phison personally, the only SSD that failed me ( i been buying SSD since SATA2 ) and the other from TG who did the Dark decided to stop the PC from booting one day, how ever the drive work in another PC and required to be formatted to work in the original PC.



Yeah i enjoyed paying $480 for 2 80GB SSD's .

I can't speak for the drive you were using which sounds like it an older controller than what is in my own but I've had no issues on the PCIe 4.0 based one.

I expect my drives to still work 10, 15 and 20 years(or more) down the line just like normal HDD's. TLC might make that, MLC very likely. QLC? Never gonna happen. Given the wear leveling on drives I've had a chance to conduct tests on, QLC will be lucky to last 30 months before they degrade to the point of being useless. QLC in a boot drive is unacceptable.

TLC on professional focused products is dubious. MLC and SLC are the only types that have the durability to qualify being in professional tier products. This will be a different story if there has been an advance in NAND chemistry or some other advance that make TLC more durable.

I can confirm MLC last, my previous desktop still has two Intel 160 G2 ssd's in Raid 0 that still operate today and that setup is about 10 years old.

But I will say good wear leveling in the controller helps alot.

How is it the Phison E16 controller with TLC on the current PCIe 4.0 drives are rated for 1,800 TBW written

Yet this new Samsung drive also on TLC is at 600 TBW the difference to me has to be the controller and wear leveling, and I'm not sure what Samsung was thinking but they seemed to drop the ball here.

 

[Animalpak]

Question :

It is useless to me if i buy one ?

My chipset : Z390

 

[ExcuseMeWtf]

Question :

It is useless to me if i buy one ?

My chipset : Z390

Depends on your existing storage setup.

If you're still on HDD for OS, it won't be useless obviously.

If you already have at least reasonably good SSD, use case for this one will be much more limited.

 

[R0H1T]

The misinformation around TLC, heck QLC, is staggering even on this forum

Find me real life data where you exhaust the drive lifespan without filling it with billions of bits of garbage 24x7 & 365 days a year! FYI some of the best performing drives on the market right now are TLC & most if not all TBW rating are highly conservative ~ The Best NVMe SSD for Laptops and Notebooks: SK hynix Gold P31 1TB SSD Reviewed

Also (rated) endurance ≠ reliability or indeed drive lifespan

 

[bug]

The misinformation around TLC, heck QLC, is staggering even on this forum

Find me real life data where you exhaust the drive lifespan without filling it with billions of bits of garbage 24x7 & 365 days a year! FYI some of the best performing drives on the market right now are TLC & most if not all TBW rating are highly conservative ~ The Best NVMe SSD for Laptops and Notebooks: SK hynix Gold P31 1TB SSD Reviewed

The average user doesn't know how to tune on OS and will have indexing and AV software running in the background. Hell, even something as innocuous as a web browser has been found in the past to write tons of data in the background just to be able to restore your tabs in case of a crash.
Others are compiling large projects, some are doing photo/video work.

I don't think we're being scammed into buying inferior products, but I do think it's good to know the limitations of what we buy.

Also (rated) endurance ≠ reliability or indeed drive lifespan

Considering NAND exhausting p/e cycles is the only thing that can fail on a SSD, endurance is at least 90% of reliability.

 

[Makaveli]

Also (rated) endurance ≠ reliability or indeed drive lifespan

How else does someone rate the reliability of the drive when you have never used it ?

If the Manufacturers Endurance rating is not good enough then what is?

And i'm aware things can happen during the warranty period so there is no guarantee.

 

[R0H1T]

I don't think we're being scammed into buying inferior products, but I do think it's good to know the limitations of what we buy.

Yes because most SSD manufacturers are now looking to charge for better "endurance" & I'd argue rightly so. The SSD market, much like smartphones, has been commoditized to the extent that enterprise & premium drives are their best profit makers. Don't tell me you want the SSD makers to give these products away for free, do you suppose Intel will also enable ECC on their non Xeon (workstation) chips because frankly they're also a ripoff?

Considering NAND exhausting p/e cycles is the only thing that can fail on a SSD, endurance is at least 90% of reliability.

Still waiting on that test/study showing how TBW ratings correlate to drive lifespan, as far as I'm concerned these don't matter much except for QLC & even there Intel/Micron have shown that for most consumer workloads you're not at risk of exhausting them in the drive's warranty period. Now for workloads that are closer to enterprise or indeed sever usage you should get drives that are commensurately more expensive, even if just for the peace of mind.

How else does someone rate the reliability of the drive when you have never used it ?

If the Manufacturers Endurance rating is not good enough then what is?

And i'm aware things can happen during the warranty period so there is no guarantee.

The ratings basically show that the NAND is guaranteed to last for x TBs written to the drive, the drive can fail before or after for a variety of reasons. Of all the long term tests I've seen, admittedly a fair time back, not one drive failed within these parameters. Heck Samsung drives lasted the longest & exceeded multiple PBs written to them

To answer your question, it's hard to say as of now because of a variety of factors involved. For instance we have no idea how operating drives (3D NAND) at high temps for an extended period of time affects the NAND "lifespan" or indeed what happens when you're using drives for read/write heavy tasks with say good airflow. To map out scenarios where a standard TBW rating applies to all possible use cases for the drive, since the SSD maker cannot control what the drive is being used for, is nigh impossible. It's like saying AMD, Intel or Nvidia guarantee their chips work under a trillion other possible (computational) use cases & never fail within that 3 year lifetime. This is why you have the lowest common denominator at work.

 

[Makaveli]

Sabrent does it again: Rocket 4 Plus SSD packs insane 7GB/sec reads

Sabrent's new Rocket 4 Plus has insane speeds of 6.85GB/sec reads, available in 500GB, 1TB, and even a huge 2TB if you need space.

www.tweaktown.com

sabrent has matching competition now. nice, i will probably just get the sabrent and save the $100 samsung name fee.

I'm far more excited for this launch than the new samsung drive and this has the new
PS5018-E18 controller in it.

The same read speed as the same but faster writes.

7000/5000 Nvme 1.3 vs 7000/6850 Nvme 1.4

 

[BSim500]

The misinformation around TLC, heck QLC, is staggering even on this forum . Find me real life data where you exhaust the drive lifespan without filling it with billions of bits of garbage 24x7 & 365 days a year!

I've seen that several times for those who work with HD+ video editing 9-5 day-in, day-out after a few years.

FYI some of the best performing drives on the market right now are TLC & most if not all TBW rating are highly conservative ~ The Best NVMe SSD for Laptops and Notebooks: SK hynix Gold P31 1TB SSD Reviewed

"Best performing" yet your charts say "power efficiency" not performance. So that SK P31 drive you picked out certainly looks to be a good laptop drive, but given that it tops out at just 1TB capacity with TLC hardly puts it in the same market as the heavy-duty Samsung PRO's which max at 4TB (MLC) / 8TB (TLC). People don't buy the huge MLC drives just as ordinary boot drives, they are for pros with higher data usage whose sustained throughput doesn't fall apart once the SLC buffer typical of TLC/QLC drives gets exhausted.

Also (rated) endurance ≠ reliability or indeed drive lifespan

They're hardly unrelated either. That's why warranties and TBW have been falling from 10yr (MLC PRO) to 5yr (TLC EVO) to just 3yr (QLC QVO). There is an underlying reason for that... (Hint: Can you imagine if 2017-era Gold rated PSU's were sold with 10yr warranties whilst 2020-era Platinum rated ones of the same brand were sold with just 3yr warranties. Would certainly raise a few eyebrows, eh?...)

Still waiting on that test/study showing how TBW ratings correlate to drive lifespan

I would have thought that's obvious - the fewer P/E cycles, the faster a drive will burn through it's flash-"writeability" given the same load. On top of that, 2-bit MLC -> 3-bit TLC -> 4-bit QLC also reduces the voltage state overhead vs voltage drift / cell leakage making the latter drives highly unsuitable for rarely powered up external backup drives (since they won't be able to silent background refresh when unpowered and the time between power ups could be long enough to cause problems with a QLC that has barely 7% overhead per voltage state that won't be there on MLC that has 33% or 4.5x the overhead.