Samsung 980 1TB NVMe SSD review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled-down. The camera used was a Canon DSLR shooting 12 MegaPixel photos. You should easily be able to place the M.2 unit into a compatible NVMe protocol motherboard. Most motherboards chipsets support it. You should, however, check out with the motherboard manufacturer if you have an x4 lane PCIe Gen 4.0 version with NVMe protocol support. Of course, these SSDs are backward compatible thus PCIe Gen 3.0 will work as well; however, the interconnect is halved in bandwidth per generation and that thus has a significant effect on performance. The latest Windows 10 iteration has an up-to-date NVMe 1.3 protocol driver natively, so you do not necessary to install a 3rd party driver. You can opt (and we advise) to seat the SSD under a motherboard heatsink and hide it away. If your motherboard does not offer that, please install the heatsink. Not only does that look cool, but it also keeps it cool as well. The compact M.2 2280 form factor ensures compatibility with the next-generation desktop and mobile platforms that support the M.2 PCIe slot and interface. The 80 on 2280 is short for 80mm, aka, that is the length of the card and 2280, you guessed it now .. 22mm for its width. It is that simple.

We did not tear off the sticker, as it has the warranty indentation, if we'd peel it off it would shatter into pieces.  Bit basically the SSD consists out of one NAND chip and the controller chip. The backside is empty.

Nice to observe, you'll spot one controller chip, and one NAND chip, that's it. No DRAM cache is present and all 1TB NAND storage is residing on that single chip.