Rumor: Samsung to release M.2 980 Pro SSD within two months

Samsung would be planning tor release its new M.2 PCI-E 4.0 based 980 Pro SSDs within the next two months, which, and would have higher speeds than the SSD present in the Playstation 5.

This new line of SSDs will be quite a notch faster compared to the current generation, as they are able to maintain sustained reads of up to 6500 MB/s, and writes of up to 5000 MB/s. For comparison, the Playstation 5 SSD has maximum unzipped information readings of 5500 MB/s, so this new Samsung model will outperform it by 1000 MB/s.

The new Samsung 980 Pro will be based on the Phison E16 controller and will use their own MLC Nand Flash memories, reaching these high speeds. Still, they will not be the fastest SSDs on the market: For example, ADATA is preparing SSDs with read speeds above 7000 MB/s, and there are several more companies working on similar products that will reach the limits of the PCI-E connection. 4.0 x4.

It will be interesting to see if developers start optimizing for NVME SSDs on PCs as they get faster and faster, but their difference in load times versus SATA SSDs is almost nil due to lack of I/O optimization. The new consoles, and especially the Xbox Series X that will use a system very similar to Windows 10, could help in this regard, although to know it we will have to wait a little longer until 100% designed games arrive with the new generation in mind.

The 6th generation V-NAND, the latest 3D NAND from Samsung, will be used for NAND flash memory. The number of stacked layers has increased to 128, and not only capacity and access speed but also power efficiency have been improved compared to the previous generation V-NAND.The table below compares speed and power consumption with the previous model 970 EVO Plus. When using the 980 PRO with PCIe 4.0, the power consumption is the highest, but the performance per power is the highest.

Also, when using the 980 PRO with PCIe 3.0, power consumption is greatly reduced and it operates with lower power consumption than the 970 EVO Plus, so it has an advantage in the PCIe 3.0 environment. Three models will be released, 250GB, 500GB and 1TB. The release is scheduled for the second quarter of this year