CES 2020: Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 SSD Makes An Appearance
by Billy Tallis on January 7, 2020 8:35 PM EST
Samsung's booth at CES 2020 includes our first look at their next flagship consumer SSD, the 980 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD. This would appear to be Samsung's first client/consumer SSD to support PCIe 4.0, which has until now only been rolled out to their high-end enterprise drives.
Since this just a low-key preview instead of a formal announcement with a press release, information is limited. The exhibit shows only sequential performance numbers: 6500 MB/s reads, 5000 MB/s writes. That's a bit better than what we currently see with PCIe 4.0 drives using the Phison E16 controller, but by the end of this year we should start seeing the Phison E18 and other controllers offering sequential speeds around 7GB/s, so the 980 PRO may have little or no time to set throughput records for the consumer SSD market.
The available capacities will range from 250GB to 1TB, which strongly indicates that Samsung us still using 2-bit MLC for the PRO line rather than switching to 3-bit TLC NAND flash as the rest of the industry has done for their flagships. The fate of Samsung's flagship SSD product line was a bit unclear when Samsung updated the 970 EVO with new NAND as the 970 EVO Plus but did not introduce an accompanying 970 PRO Plus.
Samsung was unable to locate any employees at their sprawling "booth" who could answer our technical questions, so we don't have confirmation of which generation of V-NAND this uses (probably the 5th gen. 92L), nor do we have any details on the controller. We also don't have a timeline for retail availability. UPDATE: Samsung says to expect more information in Q2 of this year.
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mode_13h - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link
Not to mention cheap, QLC 3D NAND.shabby - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link
Anything is better than slow laptop hard drives.dontlistentome - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link
Cheap QLC NAND is a perfect use case for consoles - write once, read lots.eek2121 - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link
QLC is far too slow for that. It is also not durable enough to withstand the constant install/uninstall/reinstall cycle that most console gamers tend to do.Mr.Vegas - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link
You right, but there is new QLC SSD Sabrent Rocket Q that does:1TB 3200/2000
2TB 3200/2900 <Thats just tad lower then what best TLC SSDs like MP510 do
4Tb 3200/2000
carbonium - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link
my Sabrent 2TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 Internal SSD does 5000/4300fred666 - Thursday, June 11, 2020 - link
QLC is more than fast enough for that. It is also more than durable enough to withstand the very few install/uninstall/reinstall cycle that most console gamers tend to do.willis936 - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link
Digital Foundry put out a 10 minute video named "In Theory: How SSD Could Radically Change Next-Gen Games Beyond Faster Loading" a few weeks ago. It is worth watching to inform yourself on what's going on with next gen console storage.I know it's poor form to reference other sources here, but anandtech has not been covering this.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link
We haven't been covering it, because most of what's out there is misguided speculation. A lot of it is stuff I know is outright wrong. When there's interesting and reliable information about console storage hardware, we'll publish it.DemonHD - Sunday, April 19, 2020 - link
Nope, it's hardware. It's specific designed SSD that designed for consoles. Also how can you say that software increases storage performance? lol.