One of the easiest ways to enhance performance for a laptop is to upgrade its storage to an SSD and the new Samsung SSD 980 Pro is one of the most recent storage offerings from their foundries. Here’s our Samsung SSD 980 Pro review where we put it to the test!

What is the Samsung SSD 980 Pro?

The Samsung SSD 980 Pro is a high-performance solid state drive with a fast PCIe 4.0 interface that is rated to offer double the data transfer rate of the older PCIe 3.0 standard  and 12.7 times faster than SATA SSDs while retaining backwards compatibility to PCIe 3.0 in order to allow for easy retrofit upgrades for older computing devices. 

It features an in-house Elpis controller by Samsung built on an 8nm process optimised for speed, uses the latest generation LPDDR4 RAM and has been officially rated, assuming ideal conditions that is, for sequential reads up to 7,000MB/s, sequential write speeds up to 5,100MB/s, random reads up to 1,000K IOPS and random writes up to 1,000 IOPs.

The SSD also has TurboWrite 2.0 to offer burst performance for demanding tasks like transferring  large pools of data and supports AES 256-bit hardware-accelerated encryption for data protection. 

Samsung also offers their free Samsung Magician app that acts as a management utility for Samsung SSDs to manage performance, health, power usage and more though it’s not necessary to use the SSD itself.

Performance, of course, varies based on the storage capacity of the drive in question with the larger SSD 980 Pro drives performing faster than smaller drives like our Samsung SSD 980 Pro review sample which has 250GB storage.

On paper, our Samsung SSD 980 Pro review sample with 250GB is capable of up to 6,400Mbps sequential read, up to 2,700Mbps sequential write, up to 500,000 IOPS in 4K QD32 random read. 

By bunging in a faster SSD like the Samsung SSD 980 Pro into a PC or laptop as an additional storage or as an upgrade to an existing SSD, you effectively get faster load times and less time twiddling your thumbs which makes it an expedient upgrade to enhance performance. In Malaysia, you’re able to purchase the Samsung SSD 980 Pro in 250GB, 

500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. To efficiently manage heat, the SSD has a nickel coating on the controller and a heat spreader label to efficiently vent modest amounts of heat though a heavier duty variant with an integrated heatsink exists but is only available in other regions.

Samsung SSD 980 Pro Review – Setup and Performance

To put our Samsung SSD 980 Pro review sample to the test, we had the privilege of loading it into a spanking new ROG Strix SCAR G733 gaming laptop which has a 12th Gen Intel Core i89-12900H CPU, 32GB memory, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU with 16GB GDDR6 vRAM and a spare SSD slot alongside the primary SSD which stores the Windows 11 OS. 

As expected, the Samsung SSD 980 Pro performed like a champ in synthetic benchmarks. In Crystal Disk Mark, it scored close to its theoretical read and write speeds with 6,431.67MB/s in sequential read speeds and 2,666MB/s in write speeds. In the AS SSD Benchmark and Anvil Storage Utilities benchmark, it scored similar numbers with slight deviations but which are well within parameters.

In a practical field test, a 66.6GB file was transferred to the SSD and it accomplished the task of moving the huge chunk of data in 36 seconds – well under a minute with peak speeds of 2.2GB/s which is fantastic by any measure of the word.

Should you buy the Samsung SSD 980 Pro?

The Samsung SSD 980 Pro with 250GB storage is a potent and expedient way to enjoy better performance on existing hardware though the larger capacity variants offer better value in terms of price per gigabyte and also for faster read and write speeds.

At RM451, it does come with a premium but you get what you pay for with higher standards of reliability and performance. You can also check out our ROG Strix Arion NVME SSD enclosure review to see how it fares when integrated into one of the best external SSD enclosures that money can buy.

Samsung SSD 980 Pro review sample courtesy of Samsung Malaysia. For more details please visit https://www.samsung.com/my/memory-storage/nvme-ssd/980-pro-250gb-nvme-pcie-gen-4-mz-v8p250bw/