The Samsung 980 Pro SSD was introduced at the CES 2020 which took place at the beginning of this year. At the event, Samsung merely just introduced the SSD card, and it has not been released yet.
However, some sources are claiming that the 980 Pro SSD will hit the shelves within the next two months, possibly even in the first half of August.
The 980 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD 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.
The sequential performance number is 6500 MB/s reads, and 5000 MB/s writes. This performance is still better than what is currently available on the market with PCIe 4.0 drives using the Phison E16 controller.
The SSD card will be available in a range of storage variants. The available capacities will range from 250GB to 1TB. This also sheds light on other areas as well.
What the range of variants means, the Samsung is still using 2-bit MLC for the PRO line rather than switching to 3-bit TLC NAND flash, something that is widely used by the rest of the industry.
It was unsure as to in which way the Samsung line of SSDs would head especially because Samsung had updated the 970 EVO with new NAND as the 970 EVO Plus, but failed to introduce an accompanying 970 PRO Plus. Anyway, since the SSD was introduced sometime back, and the introduction only had generic information regarding the SSD, it is not known as to which generation of V-NAND the 980 Pro makes use of. The information about the controller too is in the dark.
As mentioned above, a few of the sources claim that it will come out in the next two months, but since the officials have not said anything, it would be difficult to say anything with confidence.
