Samsung recently announced two new proposals for high end storage, the 980 and 980Pro series. Two different products with different price range and of course different speeds...What users can expect from the latest Samsung SSD proposals? Today we will find out...

Both the 980 and 980Pro come at the same box design, their main differences are the PRO logo with different read speeds for the Pro version (7000Mb/sec)

The 980 Pro series come with a RED Pro logo and its totally secured.

The product complies to the NVME 1.3 standard for M2280 dimensions

The 980 series comes at the same retail package format, everything is secured

- Features Comparison

Below we gathered a comparison table according to what Samsung lists for both devices at their official website

As we can see the 980 and 980Pro have several differences either in specs and/or speed. The 980 seems to be based upon NVME 1.4 standard vs 1.3c of the 980Pro. There is also a different controller (Pablo vs Elpis for the 980Pro) and the most important is that the 980Pro is armed with 1GB Low Power DDR4 SDRAM (1TB), which means it will be able to keep up with sustained reading/writing loads. Both products have 5 years of warranty, however, the 980Pro has twice the supported written host data (600TBW vs 1200 TBW of the 980 Pro). Finally the 980 Pro costs 62 more Euros than the 980 1TB version. Note that only the 980Pro comes with 2TB variance, while the 980 (for the time being) is limited to 1TB version.

- Installation

Not much to be said here, just get the drive and install it at an empty NVMe slot. In some boards you have to change Bios settings to Storage: PCIe in order to get the drive recognized. Samsung offers their version of Data Migration Software and of course the well-known Samsung Magician Software that we recommend to get installed in order to have the latest available firmware update and general monitor for your newly bought Samsung SSD products.

Note that in past Samsung offered their version of NVME driver for Windows, however doesn't list the 980 and 980Pro as compatible products (only 970 PRO, 970 EVO, 960 PRO, 960 EVO and 950 PRO are listed as compatible). Perhaps in future they update their NVME driver for the 980 series as well.

Our tests system is based at an Asus ROG Strix X570-E Gaming Motherboard paired with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X with 32GB RAM of G.Skill 3200 CL14. All Windows 10 x64 updates and drivers’ updates were installed before starting our tests. All tests performed with the stock Microsoft NVME driver with NTFS format.

After the format, you should expect to see around 931MB of free space. The CrystalDiskInfo gives us some details about the 980Pro 1TB model, it runs at PCIe 4.0 x4 and supports NVM Express 1.3:

and the 980 1TB run at PCIe 3.0 x4 and supports the latest NVM Express 1.4 protocol.

The Samsung Magician showed that both SSDs had their latest firmware installed and can give us more details abou each installed drive:

The 980 Pro 1TB uses 1GB of DDR4 memory to support high read/write speeds:

, while the 980 1TB series doesn't include onboard DDR memory and uses Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology, which should lead in lower speeds when copying/writing very big files.