Samsung 980 PRO Briefly Listed Online
by Billy Tallis on August 31, 2020 2:00 PM ESTIn what seems to be an accidental leak, a product page for the highly-awaited Samsung 980 PRO SSD was posted and later taken down from Samsung's website for Singapore. The 980 PRO was first previewed in January at CES as their first consumer SSD to support PCIe 4.0, but with very little technical information. No release date was announced but Samsung's PR said to expect more information in Q2.
The timing of this leak is unsurprising: if Samsung was planning for a Q2 or early Q3 release before COVID-19 hit, it makes sense for them to be preparing for a release in the near future. However, this leak brings a few surprise about what kind of product the 980 PRO will be. Since this wasn't an official, coordinated announcement, the specifications revealed may not be final and we still have no indication of pricing or launch date. But the big surprise is that the 980 PRO will apparently be using TLC NAND, a first for Samsung's PRO models. Samsung has been the last holdout offering high-end MLC-based SSDs while the rest of the SSD industry has moved on to TLC (and QLC), for both consumer and enterprise markets. Samsung provided an early indication that they may finally be abandoning MLC NAND in early 2019 when the TLC-based 970 EVO was replaced with the 970 EVO Plus, a refresh that switched from 64L to 92L TLC. There was never any sign of a corresponding 970 PRO Plus model in the works.
The switch from MLC to TLC means the rated write endurance of the 980 PRO will be half that of the 970 PRO and equivalent to the TLC-based 970 EVO and EVO Plus. The upside is that the 980 PRO may be more competitively priced against other high-end consumer NVMe SSDs. It's also quite possible that Samsung needed to introduce SLC caching in order to hit the 5GB/s write speeds they're promising for the 980 PRO.
Samsung High-End NVMe SSD Comparison | |||||
Model | 980 PRO | 970 PRO | 970 EVO Plus | ||
Capacities | 250 GB 500 GB 1000 GB |
512 GB 1024 GB |
250 GB 500 GB 1000 GB 2000 GB |
||
Interface | PCIe 4 x4 NVMe 1.3 |
PCIe 3 x4 NVMe 1.3 |
PCIe 3 x4 NVMe 1.3 |
||
Form Factor | M.2 2280 Single-sided | ||||
Controller | Samsung Elpis | Samsung Phoenix | Samsung Phoenix | ||
NAND | 3D TLC | 64L MLC | 92L TLC | ||
SLC Write Caching | Yes | No | Yes | ||
Specifications below are for 1TB models specifically | |||||
Sequential Read | 7000 MB/s | 3500 MB/s | 3500 MB/s | ||
Sequential Write | 5000 MB/s (SLC) 2000 MB/s (TLC) |
2700 MB/s | 3300 MB/s (SLC) 1700 MB/s (TLC) |
||
Random Read (4kB) |
QD1 | 22k IOPS | 15k IOPS | 19k IOPS | |
Max | 1M IOPS | 500k IOPS | 600k IOPS | ||
Random Write (4kB) |
QD1 | 60k IOPS | 55k IOPS | 60k IOPS | |
Max | 1M IOPS | 500k IOPS | 550k IOPS (SLC) 400k IOPS (TLC) |
||
Active Power | 6.2 W (Average) 8.9 W (Burst) |
5.2 W (Read) 5.7 W (Write) |
5.5 W (Read) 6.0 W (Write) |
||
Write Endurance | 600 TB 0.3 DWPD |
1200 TB 0.66 DWPD |
600 TB 0.3 DWPD |
||
Warranty | 5 years | 5 years | 5 years | ||
Launch Date | 2020? | May 2018 | January 2019 | ||
Launch MSRP | TBD | $629.99 (62¢/GB) |
$249.99 (25¢/GB) |
The product page for the 980 PRO indicated that sequential read speed is now planned to be 7 GB/s, an improvement over the 6.5 GB/s listed earlier this year at CES. We also get our first look at random IO specifications, with the 1TB model hitting a maximum of 1M IOPS for either reads or writes. Performance at a queue depth of 1 is slightly improved over the 970 PRO and 970 EVO Plus, and post-cache sequential write speeds are also up from the 970 EVO Plus. This points to the 980 PRO as likely using Samsung's 1xx-layer 3D TLC rather than the 92L used in the 970 EVO Plus.
Power consumption from the 980 PRO is unsurprisingly higher than its predecessors, with the spec sheet showing 6.2W average and 8.9W in "burst mode". Samsung's high-end NVMe SSDs have already been fairly power-hungry, and making use of PCIe 4.0 speeds requires even more power. However, the 980 PRO should bring a substantial improvement in efficiency, because peak performance is doubling but power draw is not increasing by anywhere near that much. Samsung is likely following the same strategy as most other SSD controller designers by moving to a much newer fabrication process as part of the PCIe 4.0 transition.
The capacity options for the 980 PRO are a bit odd. The 970 PRO was offered in 512GB and 1TB capacities, and a 2TB capacity was hinted at but never made it to market. The lack of a 256GB option made some sense as that low capacity would likely not have been able to offer "PRO"-level performance. The 980 PRO moves to Samsung's typical TLC capacities: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, but still omits the 2TB option that has been available from the EVOs. It seems likely that a 2TB 980 PRO model would be released at a later date.
Moving the 980 PRO to TLC NAND raises big questions for what to expect from a 980 EVO. Moving it to QLC NAND might be a bit premature, and would definitely be a big step down for that product line even if it added PCIe 4.0 support. My expectation is that any 980 EVO would more likely be a lower-performance, lower-power mainstream TLC drive, possibly without PCIe 4.0 support. Or to put it another way, an answer to the SK hynix Gold P31, which we think represents the direction the mainstream NVMe market segment is moving towards.
Source: Samsung
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Kvaern1 - Wednesday, September 2, 2020 - link
That was by last years standard.romrunning - Monday, August 31, 2020 - link
This drive probably is the one that will be used in the PS5. That read speed especially would be great for consoles!Billy Tallis - Monday, August 31, 2020 - link
This drive is almost certainly not the one Sony is going to be using in the PS5. The capacities are all wrong and the read performance is higher.This drive is probably going to be usable in the PS5 as an aftermarket replacement, but going from ~768GB to 1024GB isn't much of an upgrade. A 2TB 980 PRO would be a more interesting upgrade option for the PS5.
Kvaern1 - Wednesday, September 2, 2020 - link
"A 2TB 980 PRO would be a more interesting upgrade option for the PS5."But at what price?
Beaver M. - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
This PS5 SSD hype is funny.Everyone who knows a bit about SSDs knows that they will only achieve such claimed performance through a tricky cache system (one that also needs a lot of work by game developers to work properly), which indeed might be revolutionary, but easily done for the PC as well, with average performance SSDs.
edzieba - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
A good highlight of why PCIe 4 has minimal impact on real world SSD performance for client applications: big boosts to sequential read/write speeds, but QD1 random read/writes - what the drive will be spending 99.9% of its time doing, and the biggest impact on perceived performance and particularly responsiveness - see only incremental improvement, mostly from the improved controller rather than the interface.blzd - Monday, September 7, 2020 - link
Why is the industry now moving backwards in rated write endurance?Isn't that the biggest issue with running an SSD?
Billy Tallis - Monday, September 7, 2020 - link
Write endurance is a problem that has always loomed over the SSD market, but has never become a big problem in practice. For years, we've been sacrificing unneeded endurance to get lower costs and higher capacities, and so far it's been the right choice for almost all kinds of customers and use cases. TLC has been mainstream for a long time now, and it's holding up fine. QLC is genuinely not good enough for some real-world use cases, but it is good enough for most mainstream consumer use cases and many server use cases. MLC is overkill for basically any application that wouldn't be better off with SLC or Optane.