Samsung today confirmed the price and availability details for its new PCIe 4.0-ready 980 PRO SSD. The company showed off this M.2 NVMe SSD at the Consumer Electronics Show back in January this year. The details revealed at that time were slim but it did confirm that the SSD was capable of reaching extremely high sequential read/write speeds.
We knew that this high-performance SSD was going to be launched soon as it was recently greenlit by South Korea’s National Radio Research Agency. PC owners looking for a fast and high-end storage solution now have a great option in the 980 PRO SSD.
980 PRO is Samsung's first consumer PCIe 4.0 SSD
The biggest selling point of this SSD is its compatibility with M.2 slots over the PCIe 4.0 interface. Those who use the SSD with a compatible motherboard will be able to achieve sequential read / write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s, respectively. Samsung claims that this makes the 980 PRO up to twice as fast as PCI 3.0 SSDs and up to 12.7 times faster than conventional SATA SSDs.
PCIe 4.0 adoption is only just gaining steam and the arrival of this SSD may give PC builders an incentive to upgrade to a motherboard with a compatible M.2 slot in order to get peak performance out of the 980 PRO. Even when hooked up to a M.2 slot with PCIe 3.0 which is the interface that's supported by most motherboards currently, the 980 PRO can reach sequential read / write speeds of 3,500MB/s and up to 3,450MB/s for the 1TB model respectively.
Samsung has confirmed that customers will be able to buy the 980 PRO SSD starting this month across the globe. It's available in 1TB, 500GB and 250GB models for $229.99, $149.99 and $89.99 respectively. A 2TB model is also going to be released before the end of this year.
