Samsung has just announced its first DRAM-less consumer-grade NCMe SSD — the Samsung 980. Not to be confused with the 980 Pro, the latest consumer SSD promises an excellent blend of speed, power efficiency and reliability.
The company claims that the Samsung 980 SSD is suitable for everyday PC users, gamers, as well as content creators, and to put things in perspective, the new 980 SSD delivers 56% improved power efficiency over the previous 970 EVO solution.
As for the DRAM-less design, Samsung was able to mitigate the speed disadvantages posed by the lack of short-term memory by utilizing Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology. It links the drive directly to the host processor's DRAM and it all results in the 980 NVMe SSD outperforming regular SATA SSDs six-to-one.
Samsung 980 NVMe SSD specifications and price
The Samsung 980 SSD has a PCIe Gen.3.0 x4, NVMe 1.4 interface and an M.2 form factor. The drive can top 3,500 / 3,000 MB/s read/write speeds, and up to 500K IOPS / 480K IPS random read/write speed.
The drive uses the Samsung Magician management software and it benefits from AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0, and Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667) data encryption technologies.
Samsung is selling the new DRAM-less 980 NVMe SSD in three configurations: 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. They cost $49.99, $69.99, and $129.99, respectively.
