SAMSUNG 980 REVIEW: AN NVME SSD DESIGNED FOR GAMING

The Samsung 980 is a more important SSD than you might think. With the 980 range, the Korean house had aimed at the high end of the market, as we saw in the review of the Samsung 980 Pro , one of the fastest NVME PCIe SSDs recently released. High-end which, however, is not very attractive for the mass audience, given the costs it reaches and the alternatives available today.

The biggest problem for Samsung is precisely this, the presence of brands that are able to offer good products at competitive prices, while not reaching the performance of the top of the range 980 Pro. Precisely for this reason the SSD 980 was born , a memory unit NVMe PCIe that seeks to offer perfect performance for less demanding users at a more competitive price.  healthbeautystudio

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The SSD 980 is sold in a box very similar to that of the higher variant, with the memory unit well protected by plastic wrapping. Also in this case the bundle is reduced to a minimum, in fact there is only the SSD, no heatsink to dissipate the heat, but it is an accessory element because now modern motherboards are equipped with passive heatsinks offered as standard. The available denominations are from 250/500 GB and from 1 TB, offered on Amazon at 56.99, 75.98 and 132.99 euros at the time of writing this article. All models integrate 3-bit MLC V-NAND memory by spec, but this is a fact that Samsung should clarify better.

In fact, MLC memories are able to write 2 bits per memory cell, in contrast to the 3 bits declared by the Korean company, a characteristic of TLC memories: in fact we are dealing with TLC and non-MLC memories . The interface used is PCIe 3.0, unlike the higher model, which instead supports the more modern PCIe 4.0 standard. The memory controller used, codenamed Pablo, is the same as seen in the Samsung T7 Touch portable SSD we reviewed a few months ago. Unfortunately, there are no details on the characteristics of this controller, so we cannot describe its specifications in more detail.

Another difference compared to the 980 Pro is the absence of the DRAM cache , used to keep performance at high levels when transferring large amounts of data, but which raises the price hopelessly. Samsung has decided to cut it just to be able to sell the 980 at a lower cost than the Pro model. To limit the problems deriving from the absence of DRAM, Samsung uses two technologies, the first is called Host Memory Buffer (HMB) and uses the Direct Memory Access feature of the PCIe standard to provide the SSD with access to the CPU DRAM (64 MB). However, this is not enough to guarantee adequate performance, which is why we find Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0. Compared to version 1.0 this offers a larger buffer, 160 GB total against the 36 GB of the predecessor 970 Evo.

From specifications, the 1 TB 980 should reach 3.5 GB / s in sequential reading and 3 GB / s in sequential writing (the smaller denominations have lower speeds), values substantially in line with those we found during our tests. Despite the absence of the DRAM cache, Samsung has achieved remarkable peak performance, limited practically only by the interface used , PCIe 3.0. In daily use, as well as in gaming, the performance remains at a high level, only those who need to move huge amounts of data will be penalized, but these are tasks associated with professional contexts of use.

Still on the subject of gaming, the only note that we feel we can move concerns the compatibility with technologies such as RTX I / O, impossible to use since the PCIe 4.0 interface is needed. However, it must be said that, after the presentation that took place with great fanfare at the end of 2020, we no longer heard of RTX I / O , the times for its real implementation therefore seem to be still far away.

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