This SSD has gone into my Dell XPS 17 9710 laptop. And boy, it is fast. Comparing it with Samsung 970 PRO 1TB SSD I bought back in 2018, the 980 PRO is faster until a certain sequential write workload of more than or equal to 558GB (specifically comparing the 980 PRO 2TB and the 970 PRO 1TB), then the 2 drives start trading blows with each other. 2TB is also just so much more capacious than 1TB. For writing and transferring large files, it is recommended to have a heatsink and some thermal pads to go along with it. I will update accordingly about the endurance over a period of time as I have already written 3.4TBW to the drive, since I got it 9 days ago as at time of writing it. I understand many are concerns about the NAND type switcheroo from MLC in the 970 PRO to TLC in the 980 PRO, and hence, that’s what reviews are for. Objectively pointing out whether it’s endurance is something worth crying over for, however, I don’t think that it’s a necessity to debate about MLC (hallmark of older Samsung PRO SSDs) vs TLC as the endurance is likely to be high enough for most consumer/client workloads.
In the real world use, this SSD can be somewhat faster and make your system feel more responsive than the 970 PRO, but for light and casual use such as browsing the web, writing documents, editing small spreadsheets, the 2 SSDs won’t make a difference. Where this SSD make a difference however, is when you do memory and drive intensive workloads, such as batch exporting photos from Adobe Photoshop and/or Lightroom, importing videos from Adobe Premiere Pro, editing complex visual animation in Adobe After Effects, and/or virtual machines for coding or running your machine learning tasks. Not also forgetting memory swap, Adobe Creative Cloud and their suite of apps in Windows love consuming lots of memory, sometimes even consuming all 64GB of System RAM and having to do extra hundreds of GBs of memory swap. This SSD makes memory swapping a lot more efficient and responsive as to compared to my 970 PRO, thanks to the large pseudo-SLC caching being done. After the SLC cache is saturated, the TLC write of 2GB/s is still considerably fast, however the 970 PRO 1TB beats the 980 PRO 2TB in this region. And that is also perfectly normal because the 980 PRO uses TLC NAND. I am not saying that MLC NAND is definitely better than TLC NAND, but the point I want to drive home is to look at both drives in an objective manner and see which one fits your needs better. Whether you want a drive with shorter burst write speeds and more capacity or you don’t mind a slightly slower drive (at the beginning) with more endurance. The choice should be based on what you do, what you need and your workload.
As for read speeds, the 980 PRO is definitely most of the time much faster than the older 970 PRO. Yes, the 980 PRO is definitely not the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD you can find in the market with newer Phison E18 and Micron 176L TLC NAND SSDs on the market, but this is a fast SSD in its own right.
Overall, I am very happy with this SSD. If you are looking for a balance of power consumption and speed, this is the SSD you might want to have on your consideration list
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