Introduction

As one of the world leaders in digital technology, Samsung pretty much makes any type of electronic device you can think of. Their products are used by millions of people around the world.

Being a leader in DRAM and flash memory production, it comes as no surprise that they are also a huge player in the SSD business. Their EVO and PRO Series SSDs are highly popular among upgraders, system builders, and enthusiasts.



Today, we're reviewing the Samsung 980 Pro SSD, which is a high-end M.2 NVMe drive that introduces support for the PCI-Express 4.0 interface. Internally, the Samsung 980 Pro uses Samsung's new eight-channel "Elpis" controller. Everything on the 980 Pro is produced by Samsung—the flash chips are their V-NAND v6, which uses between 110 and 136 layers of TLC. A DRAM chip is also included—it provides 1 GB of storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

Samsung offers the 980 Pro in capacities of 250 GB ($90), 500 GB ($135), 1 TB ($230), and 2 TB ($460). Endurance for these models is set to 150 TBW, 300 TBW, 600 TBW, and 1200 TBW respectively. Samsung provides a five-year warranty for the 980 Pro.

Packaging

The Drive

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


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Samsung 980 Pro connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, two flash chips, and one DRAM chip; the other side of the PCB is empty.


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, 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.

Chip Component Analysis

This is Samsung's new PCIe Gen 4 controller called "Elpis." It is produced on a 8 nm production process in Samsung's foundries, same as NVIDIA's Ampere GPUs. Compared to previous controllers, Elpis can process 128 queues at the same time (Phoenix had 32, UBX only 8).


The two flash chips are Samsung TLC V-NAND v6, which has between 110 and 136 layers. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


A Samsung LPDDR4 chip provides 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup