Samsung’s 980 Pro SSD may not be the company’s PCIe 4.0 NVMe flagship any more, but it’s still a fearsomely fast SSD in its own right that comes very close indeed to the 990 Pro in real-world performance tests. The 2TB model is currently discounted over at Amazon US, where you can find it for just $103 rather than its usual $128 – one of the best prices we’ve recorded for a 2TB drive of this speed and quality.
The 980 Pro hits all of its marks in terms of specs and features, with a PCIe 4.0 interface, TLC NAND flash providing good performance and longevity and a DRAM cache pumping up sustained speeds. The advantage of Samsung’s vertically-integrated approach, where it produces the NAND, controller and DRAM in-house, mean that the 980 Pro was the first SSD to really maximise the PCIe 4.0 interface and it remains one of the fastest options on the market despite having launched in early 2021.
The Samsung 980 Pro works well for gaming and content creation workloads on PCs, but will also serve as extra internal game storage for PS5 consoles – though Sony recommend adding an NVMe heatsink to ensure performance remains high. We’ve recommended this $9 model for ages after testing it ourself, if you’d like to pick one up.
