After AMD and Intel (next year's Rocket Lake processor) have entered the PCIe Gen 4 generation, including graphics cards, SSD storage devices, etc. have begun to enter the PCIe Gen 4 field, especially SSD storage devices, after entering the PCIe Gen 4 generation , the sequential read and write performance can break through the level of more than 5000 MB/s. For video clips and game experiences that require fast access to large files, the storage speed of PCIe Gen 4 can improve the speed of acquiring materials or outputting after editing. And what Chen Ba is going to come to test today is Samsung's latest NVMe SSD that supports PCIe Gen 4 specifications: 980 Pro.

●Samsung 980 Pro out of the box appearance

The outer box of Samsung 980 Pro, different from the previous generation 970 Pro, adopts a straight outer box vision. This time, the 1TB style of Zhanqi agent was borrowed.

A maximum read speed of 7000 MB/s is indicated on the bottom of the box.

Samsung 980 Pro boxed back.

The inside of the box is as traditional as Samsung, with only the SSD body and installation/warranty manual.

On the front of the Samsung 980 Pro body, under the sticker, you can see two flash memory particles on the left and a silver control AD8542ARUZ-REEL chip on the right. The reason for the silver is that Samsung added a layer of nickel plating to the control chip. layer, there is also an LPDDR4 memory in the center as a cache.

Borrow a picture from Samsung's official website to show the layout of the 980 Pro:

The silver part is the control chip, and the other is the LPDDR4 memory for caching and two V-NAND flash memory particles.

A close-up of the control chip part of the 980 Pro, the silver part is nickel-plated.

However, because the number of domestic Samsung 980 Pro borrowed products is relatively small, and there are other media to borrow later, it is inconvenient for Chen Ba to tear off the sticker to shoot the appearance of the chip below, and if there is a chance, it will be added later.

On the back of the Samsung 980 Pro body, the 980 Pro with a single-sided design has no chip arrangement on the back, but the large-area certification mark sticker on the right is not only a sticker, but a copper foil heat dissipation label with thermal conductivity, which will quickly The temperature of the flash memory particles is evenly conducted to the rest of the SSD.

The copper foil heat dissipation label on the back of the Samsung 980 Pro shows that the copper foil has a certain thickness.

Once again borrowing photos from Samsung's official website to illustrate the thermal design of the 980 Pro:

●Samsung 980 Pro real machine test

Then I installed the Samsung 980 Pro and tested it. Due to the PCIe Gen 4 interface, Chen Ba used the AMD X570 chipset as the test platform. In addition, the system disk was also Seagate FireCuda 520 1TB with PCIe Gen 4 interface. The following is the test Platform related parameters:

◆CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X

◆Motherboard: ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO (WIFI)

◆Memory: G.Skill Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 C16 8G X 2

◆System disk: Seagate Firecuda 520 SSD 1TB

◆Display card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 -ic/" title="3080 model">3080-ic/" title="3080 model">3080-ic/" title="3080 model">3080-ic/" title= "Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="3080 Model">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080" >3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080 -ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080-ic/" title="Model 3080">3080 FE

◆Power supply: ASUS ROG THOR 850W

◆Cooling system: CORSAIR iCue H150i RGB PRO XT 360mm AIO water cooling

◆Operating system: Windows 10 Pro 2004 version

Let's first look at the Samsung 980 Pro's performance under the test software. First, use Crystal Diskinfo to check the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB specifications: It adopts PCIe 4.0 x4 transmission interface and supports NVMe 1.3 specifications, but in the function support section, only the SMART diagnostic function is displayed on Crystal Diskinfo, and the TRIM part uses Samsung Magician software. Also turn on.

Samsung 980 Pro official spec sheet.

It can be seen from the specification table that the 980 Pro uses 3-bit MLC particles (ie TLC) in the flash memory particle part, which also causes the 980 Pro to write less than the previous generation 970 Pro in the TBW career write capacity part. Half, from the original 1200TB to 600 TBW, this may be a bit disappointing for friends who originally bought Samsung SSDs for the high write capacity of their careers.

●Samsung 980 Pro CrystalDiskMark test

Using CrystalDiskMark to test the actual access speed of Samsung 980 Pro SSD 1TB, the result of sequential read is 6279.61 MB/s, and the result of sequential write is 4983.40 MB/s. In the part of random write depth 1 in 4K small blocks, read The speed is 82.22 MB/s and the write speed is 178.49 MB/s.

●Samsung 980 Pro ATTO Disk BenchMark test

In the ATTO Disk BenchMark test, the read peak of Samsung 980 Pro SSD 1TB appears in blocks above 256KB (inclusive), with a read speed of 5.3 GB/s, and the write peak is in 64KB blocks. The speed of 4.6 GB/s or more is quite good in the performance of small file access.

Read and write IO scores.

●Samsung 980 Pro AS SSD Benchmark test

In the AS SSD Benchmark section, the Samsung 980 1TB SSD has a total score of 7440. Under the 1GB test file setting, the sequential read and write scores are: read 5054.55 MB/s and write 3777.01 MB/s. The results of the random access IO part are 565429 iops read and 698313 iops written in the 4K 64-Third part.

●Samsung 980 Pro TxBench test

In the TxBench test, the Samsung 980 Pro SSD 1TB achieved a sequential read of 6350.338 MB/s and a write of 4896.476 MB/s, while the 4K random read and write QD1 achieved a read score of 82.381 mB/s and a write of 179.937 mB. /s.

●Samsung 980 Pro test data comparison with other products

In the horizontal comparison part, due to the lack of PCIe Gen 4 SSDs on the market, Chen Ba only pulled out the previously tested Seagate Firecuda 520 (updated test data) for comparison, and also added the previous generation Samsung 970 Pro to the test. Scores are added for reference.

Sequential reading and writing performance comparison:

4K random read and write score comparison:

●Samsung 980 Pro SSD 1TB PCMark 10 performance test

Then use the storage device test items in PCMark 10, including the Full SYSTEM Drive Benchmark of the whole system, the Data Drive Benchmark used as a data disk, and the Drive Performance Consistency test of a large amount of data read and write performance. For testing, the test data is also added to Seagate Firecuda 520 and Samsung 970 Pro (lack of some test items) for comparison. The following are the test results:

As far as the test results are concerned, the 980 Pro has improved the sequential read and write speed through the PCIe Gen 4 specification this time. The overall performance is 1.5 to 2 times that of the previous generation of the 970 Pro using the PCIe Gen 3 specification. The new Elpis controller The random and small file access parts are also accelerated a lot. This can be seen from the comparison with the Seagate FireCuda 520, which is the same PCIe Gen 4 specification. The performance of the 980 Pro as a system disk is faster than the FireCuda 520. on many.

●Samsung 980 Pro measured temperature performance

Chen Ba also measured the surface temperature of the 980 Pro simultaneously during the test. During the TxBench full-disk writing test and the Drive Performance Consistency test of PCMark 10, the temperature of the FLIR infrared thermometer was used to measure the surface temperature. Without a heat sink on the surface, the surface temperature of the 980 Pro will reach a temperature of about 88 ℃.

The temperature of the control chip during the TxBench full-disk write test without the motherboard heatsink is displayed, and the Crystal Diskinfo display will be around 80 ℃.

TxBench full disk write test

PCMark 10 Sustainability Test

However, using the FLIR E6 infrared thermometer to measure the results, it can be seen that the surface temperature of the 980 Pro can reach close to 88 ℃ under a lot of reading and writing work. If the motherboard has an M.2 heat sink design, it is recommended to To be installed.

Control chip temperature after installing the motherboard heatsink.

●Samsung Magician management magician tool software

In the software part, Samsung still provides Magician management tool software to allow users to monitor the operation status of the 980 Pro and optimize the 980 Pro. The test version is 6.2.1.

Samsung Magician manages the main interface of the magician tool software.

Samsung Magician manages the built-in performance test items of the magician tool software. The speed measured by the 980 Pro is 6887 MB/s for sequential reading and 5196 MB/s for sequential writing. The random read performance is 358154 IOPS and the random write performance is 316894 IOPS.

Diagnostic detection is possible for the SSD, which takes about 13 minutes for a full scan for a 1TB capacity.

You can set the capacity setting of Over Provisioning in the Samsung Management Magician software to reserve some space for the control chip to improve the performance and durability of the SSD. The default recommended size is 93GB.

Samsung manages the performance optimization function in the Magician software, and you can also set the on/off of the TRIM function in this interface.

The Secure Erase function that completely clears the SSD can restore the SSD to its factory state.

PSID encryption function.

Disk encryption with Bitlocker technology.

●Samsung 980 Pro test conclusion

After changing to TLC particles, many people may question the performance and durability of the 980 Pro, but Samsung has provided the 980 Pro with the performance of continuous reading and writing through the new Elpis control chip and enhanced heat dissipation. The same is true for the above, even if it is the same PCIe Gen 4 generation and uses the Phison E16 controller, the 980 Pro has a leading margin in most of the performance tests.

However, the most worrying part of the 980 Pro is the durability. In addition to the characteristics of the TLC particles, the high heat performance of the 980 Pro during continuous reading and writing is also a little worrying. Although Samsung itself has done a lot of heat dissipation, but It should be unavoidable to use the M.2 heatsink of the motherboard to dissipate heat.