Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Samsung 980 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


Samsung has put a little copper foil on the back of the SSD it calls "a heat spreader label to deliver effective thermal control of the NAND chip." Yeah, not really, as I doubt it makes any significant difference. It certainly doesn't have much thermal capacity simply because it has so little mass. Also, the hottest component of the drive is the controller chip, not the flash, so the label isn't positioned correctly.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and one flash chip.

Chip Component Analysis

The Samsung S4LR033 "Pablo" controller is a value-oriented 4-channel design without support for DRAM. .


On the Samsung 980, only a single flash chip is installed, a 8 Tbit 128-layer 3D TLC NAND chip.