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Data Storage

Samsung's Fast, PCIe 4.0-ready 980 Pro SSD Can Future-Proof Your PC Build (theverge.com) 78

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Samsung has unveiled its next high-performance NVMe 2280-sized M.2 drive, the 980 Pro. So far, it comes in three capacities shipping this month: 250GB for $89.99, 500GB for $149.99, and 1TB for $229.99. A 2TB model will arrive later this year, but Samsung didn't share a price. From a report: The standout feature of this drive is its compatibility with M.2 slots over the PCIe 4.0 interface. If you have a compatible motherboard, Samsung says the 980 Pro can go on a tear with sequential read / write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s, respectively. It claims that this is two times faster performance than PCIe 3.0 SSDs and nearly 13 times faster than the more affordable but slower SATA SSDs. Of course, to get the best speeds out of this Samsung M.2 drive, you'll need a compatible motherboard with a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot. Adoption of the tech is starting to ramp up, including mainstream computing products like AMD's third-generation Ryzen CPUs, its Radeon RX 5700 and 5700XT GPUs, and more recently, Nvidia's RTX 3080 graphics card. Sony and Microsoft are also using the technology for their custom SSD technologies in the PS5 and Xbox Series S / X consoles.
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Samsung's Fast, PCIe 4.0-ready 980 Pro SSD Can Future-Proof Your PC Build More

Samsung's Fast, PCIe 4.0-ready 980 Pro SSD Can Future-Proof Your PC Build

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  • What's this product going to do to prevent the future? The future is inevitable, it's always coming and it's usually faster/better than the present day design. Unless this thing has reached the theoretical maximum speed of light, there is no reason to suspect that buying this product will "future-proof" your computer in any way.

    • Re:"Future-Proof?" Sounds like marketing BS to me. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Tuesday September 22, 2020 @11:07AM (#60531578)
      It is generally assumed that next-generation games will start to rely on very fast storage which is available in consoles. So at some point these will likely become a necessity for games.

      • Still it isn't so much Future-Proof vs just upgrading to the latest and greatest to get the longest life our of your PC.
        This is not necessarily the best investment as it may be more affordable to upgrade to the technology when it is cheaper when such software begins to use the technology. But you have a few months or perhaps a year of bragging rights.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It's probably not as fast as they make out either. While the sequential speeds are great they don't mention latency or random I/O performance.

          PCI-e Gen 4 SSDs can actually be worse for latency and random I/O because the manufacturers tune them for sequential reads/writes to get high marketing numbers.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by fazig ( 2909523 )
            It's a Samsung PRO. This product series has catered to the same clientele as Intel's Optane SSDs.

            It's primarily meant for professional content creators and artists that work with tons of larger and smaller files and need to move large amounts. And of course there are also those people who buy something like an RTX 3090 for gaming, who might also buy those PRO SSDs.
            If they stay true to the customers they catered to previously, these SSDs ought to be tuned for longevity with MLC NAND memory and they ought

        • Well, the consoles that rely on this are going to be released soon, and they will probably stick around for a good 5 years. The last 2 rounds of xBox were 7 years apart. Same goes for playstation. So now is actually a decent time to buy into the technology as console games will be stuck with the technology they have for a reasonable amount of time.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by fazig ( 2909523 )
            So why not wait until a game releases that makes these a requirement?
            It'll probably take game developers at least one or two years after the release of the dev kits until they can bring a game to the market that requires high bandwidth and high IOPS storage drives.

            These aren't going to be in limited supply. They're going to manufacture and sell these for the next couple of years. A time during which the prices should drop and new and even better SSDs should become available.

            • For consoles especially. One of their key features is they give game developers a fairly consistent platform to develop on. That is why game made for the console tend to be on average a little higher quality than the PC Games, despite the PC often being an order of power more powerful of a system.

              If you are game developer you know the NVMe will take 2 seconds to load so much data, that you want to have ready on hand. You can code your gram to collect that data 2 seconds before you need it. While if you t

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by fazig ( 2909523 )
                I happen to be a game developer, since a little over a year now, using Unreal Engine 4.
                The most important feature for gaming performance here are random reads and IOPS. That is because a lot of the game files that have to be loaded, like meshes and texture assets, stuff like virtual functions and so forth, are rather small files. Predictability on what is needed when also has its limits here if we're talking about real time gaming. And on top of that a lot of the data that needs to be loaded is not critica

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by imidan ( 559239 )
          I do some gaming, though not nearly as much as I used to. I upgraded my PC last summer and one of the additions was a Samsung 970 1 TB M.2 NVMe. I made it my primary boot drive. In the past, I have often resisted allowing my desktop computer to sleep during the day because I was too impatient waiting for it to wake up. With this thing as the primary, not only does it resume from sleep so fast I don't care anymore, it actually boots cold to a desktop in under 5 seconds. I don't know how much of that is the S

      • It is generally assumed that next-generation games will start to rely on very fast storage which is available in consoles. So at some point these will likely become a necessity for games.

        I'll challenge this. I'm going to wage we are multiple generations away from this kind reliance on storage. This is the RTX / Raytracing problem on steroids. Consoles are a consistent target and thus easy to program for, but computers are no such thing. A game that relies on the ability to stream data via DirectStorage directly from the SSD to the GPU memory will do so for a specific reason of wanted to run a game without any breaks, loading screens, or loading rooms (hallways, or barriers to squeeze throug

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Your challenge failed, and you have demonstrated to the world that you didn't even read beyond 4 sentences of my post. Hint: I mentioned DIrectStorage in the 5th sentence.

            Now read the post and actually reply to my point rather than just name dropping some future API names.

        • A game that relies on the ability to stream data via DirectStorage directly from the SSD to the GPU memory will do so for a specific reason of wanted to run a game without any breaks, loading screens, or loading rooms (hallways, or barriers to squeeze through).

          Reducing or eliminating breaks is definitely one advantage of having access to faster storage but it is certainly not the only benefit. Just as important (if not more) is that many of the graphical performance benefits provided by Unreal Engine 5 ar

      • That's only because consoles don't have expandable RAM; a proper gaming PC doesn't have to rely on fast read speeds to provide high FPS; everything fits in RAM.
      • I would have simply written "If you're loading anything, especially an OS, off a mechanic hard drive...WTF is wrong with you?"
    • The title makes it sound a bit like the kind of article someone gets a kickback for writing or a regurgitated press release because someone couldn't be assed to write an actual article today.

      • I'm typing this using a generic (cause I'm "frugal") 2 TB NVMe M.2 2280 drive [amazon.com] I bought a year ago. Price-wise, you could buy two of those from last year and mirror them to get a similar speed, but also double the storage.

        Samsung is unlikely to be the best price/TB for long...

    • Future Proofing seems like a good idea in theory but in practice rarely works out well.

      I remember the big deal when they made motherboards with CPU Sockets vs having the CPU soldered in. This was suppose to Future Proof your PC. Because when your CPU became old and out of date, you can just swap it with a new faster one. Good in theory. However they did this with the 486 line up. Then the Pentium came out with a new Pin Set. Then the Pentium 2 decide to go all weird.
      In general when you really need an u

    • It's more like making your new computer build future-resistant.
    • Do you really need it explained to you that 7gb/5gb per second transfer speeds makes it "future proof" for an indefinite amount of time after current time? Those are pretty damn fast transfer speeds but unfortunately not "pedant proof".
    • There is no future-proof, only future-resistance.

  • Got power loss protection?

    No?

    Not suitable for storing data then.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It probably does actually. Most decent SSDs have enough capacitors to detect power loss and save critical data.

      Does any consumer grade hardware have enough battery backup to save large chunks of data like enterprise grade stuff? I don't think so. The filesystem just needs to be robust enough to deal with it.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • An unexpected power loss can scramble an M.2 drive. After going through that a few times, I got an inexpensive UPS for my PC.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          Did you disable write caching 1st? What brand drive?

          • Write caching enabled. Western Digital Black 1TB NVME.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

              I have one of those in my new machine, I think I'll disable write caching, I doubt it provides any noticeable benefit on a machine predominantly for gaming and web-browsing.

            • Please read the other reply you've got for you very insightful post.

              OTOH, there is a lot of room available in there for caching but yet, so volatile. Sad, so sad:
              http://ibb.co/mRVSaG [ibb.co]
              --
              just my 2 humble Adam Sarword cents

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Agripa ( 139780 )

            It has nothing to do with write caching, which only results in loss of uncommitted data which any good file system can recover from. Interrupting the write process itself can corrupt data other than that being written, including the translation table resulting in a trashed or even bricked drive.

        • When will the San Francisco AMC Metreon reopen? Can I bring in a bottle of water since there will be no concessions available?

          I was talking with them yesterday and they say they don't allow plastic bottles because they aren't green enough and they don't want to risk a health hazard for their employees picking up the trash left behind by viewers.

          They say 2 big old camp 50 ounce mugs full of black cherry soda is OK although so there you go!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Agripa ( 139780 )

        Just about every ssd made for a very long time handles power loss as gracefully as spinning discs. I don't understand why this would even be a question.

        Go find it in the specifications then. Some consumer drives have power loss protection sufficient to complete writes preventing corruption. Enterprise drives generally also protect data in transit. But most consumer drives protect neither and are subject to complete loss if loss of power occurs at the wrong time.

    • When did you ever lose data due to a power loss? For real?
  • Not likely.

    • PCIe 3.0 has been the standard for about 10 years. PCIe 4.0 is just now being implemented. There is no design for a significantly faster version of flash storage on the horizon, besides moderate increases in density and, therefore, speed.

      So, unless you are planning to keep your PC for longer than 10 years, or there is some revolutionary new SSD that is signifigantly faster than the current drives (even Optane drives aren't *that* much faster) then, yeah, one of these should be the last SSD you would have to

      • --- So, unless you are planning to keep your PC for longer than 10 years --- .... 11 years from now is still the future. You got sucked into the marketing hype.

  • There is no such thing as a future-proof PC build. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Generic User Account ( 6782004 ) on Tuesday September 22, 2020 @11:17AM (#60531608)
    Buying PC stuff you don't know you'll definitely need soon is usually an expensive mistake. A "PCI 4.0-ready" SSD is early-adopter territory. Don't go there unless money is of no concern to you.
    • 7gb/s read and 5 gb/s write is a godsend for a lot of people. The fact that it's not relevant to you doesn't change that.

    • Re:There is no such thing as a future-proof PC bui (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ritz_Just_Ritz ( 883997 ) on Tuesday September 22, 2020 @12:24PM (#60531858)

      Huh? I've had a PCIe 4.0 SSD in my AMD Ryzen 3900x system for about a year now. I've been pretty happy with the performance. PCIe 4.0 SSD's have been available for quite some time using phison controllers. It has just plain worked without any drama for me. A little over 4GB/sec on reads and a little over 3GB/sec on writes on my Ubuntu desktop. Quite the mind bender to be able to compile the latest piggy version of Emacs in under 10 secs. :)

      Best,

      • Quite the mind bender to be able to compile the latest piggy version of Emacs in under 10 secs. :)

        10 seconds?! That's faster than Emacs boots on my system!

    • Don't go there unless money is of no concern to you.

      What are you talking about. The cost of this is marginal compared to the PCIe 3.0 SSDs. It doesn't make sense *not* to adopt this. You're pinching pennies. Hell the best price I can currently find on a 970 Pro is *MORE EXPENSIVE* than the RRP of these 980 Pro drives. Though I guess if you want to save $50 you could go multiple generations into the past and buy a slow SSD.

      Given storage is one of the biggest sources of delay in a modern PC you'd be mad to save your pennies here.

      • Actually, since this drive has fallen back to TLC to make it cheaper (read: more profitable) rather than MLC seen in previous Pro drives, THEY are the ones pinching pennies, and if you have the kind of read/write loads that commonly actually need this kind of performance, then this can be an issue.

        So unless you fit in the tiny corner of people for whom absolute peak read speed is what matters, however write cycles and retention do NOT matter, then go for it.

        • TLC vs MLC isn't pinching pennies, it's an engineering decision with trade-offs and drawbacks.

          So unless you fit in the tiny corner of people for whom absolute peak read speed is what matters, however write cycles and retention do NOT matter, then go for it.

          You've just described a benefit to literally every desktop computer in the world. The "tiny corner" of people are generally those who fall *outside* of the use case of insane peak read with lower reliability and write cycle requirements.

  • It would be great if Slashdot would start labeling these sponsored posts.

  • In my 40 years of buying "future proof" items I have possibly once had the opportunity to make advantage of that 'feature'. By the time you want to upgrade this will be obsolete. Either that or, if a firmware update it won't take full advantage of the new features, I.E. PCI 5.0. Even AMD's AM# sockets. Unless you plan on upgrading in a short period of time you won't. And good luck trying to find an old motherboard, like an AM3 socketed MOBO that doesn't cost as much as a new X570!! I know. I had a great AMD
  • but where is the space. I have a total of 6.5TB used across my drives. I don't see one for that size.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by U0K ( 6195040 )
      This isn't the Highlander franchise. There can be more than only one. At least in most machines, that is the case.
      You even used the plural of drive in your very own comment.

      • amd desktop boards only have 1 cpu pci-e m.2 slot others are on the chipset bus.
        Highend desktop / workstation boards have more cpu pci-e ones

    • Actually used or more like "probably will never read again" variety? Digital hoarding habit does not need to be stored on the fastest SSD you can find.
  • "Future proof" good lord Slashdot has really gone downhill msmash isn't even bothering to make it sound like news any more.

  • TL:DR; 980 Pro is faster and cheaper then 970 Pro

    Model.. 1 TB Read Write Interface
    980 Pro $229 7000 5000 (PCIe 4.0)
    980 Pro $229 3500 3450 (PCIe 3.0)
    970 Pro $349 3500 2700 (PCIe 3.0)

    Note: Read/Write speed is in MB/s.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Guspaz ( 556486 )

      If you go by the advertised specs, yes. If you go by the actual benchmarks, the 980 Pro is slower than the 970 Pro due to the change from MLC to TLC.

  • That would be useful.

  • There is no such thing as Future Proof, it's absurd to even suggest it. A few things will last longer (I've got older stuff), but the vast majority of tech is end of life within 5-7 years. Your typically doing well to keep something in use for 10 years. At some point the electricity to run old technology is more than the cost of replacing it with new.

    Technology evolves, it always has and always will. Your better off spending your money on things that are standards compliant, that can be readily upgraded and

    • There is no such thing as Future Proof, it's absurd to even suggest it. A few things will last longer (I've got older stuff), but the vast majority of tech is end of life within 5-7 years. Your typically doing well to keep something in use for 10 years. At some point the electricity to run old technology is more than the cost of replacing it with new.

      Technology evolves, it always has and always will. Your better off spending your money on things that are standards compliant, that can be readily upgraded and backups. It's a bit like saying a long standing problem like tape is solved. The problem doesn't ever get solved because the use case doesn't ever go away.

      Stop misleading people into wasting money buying bleeding edge technology they don't need. Few people can utilize bleeding edge technology and get their money's worth out of it.

      Sure there is. Something which has been destroyed will not experience, or be experienced in, the future. So to future-proof your build, just destroy it as soon as it's complete.

      Getting off the pedant wagon, if you buy the components with the newest interfaces, and ideally the best performance (though that one isn't as necessary), you have the best "future resistance" possible.

      Today, that would mean getting a motherboard with PCIe 4.0, at least one (and ideally 2 or 3) PCIe 4.0 NVMe sockets, USB 3.2 and/or

  • buying future proof stuff is odd with tech that is already a few years old.
    5.0 is here today ( see Jan 2019 link http://www.personal-view.com/t... [personal-view.com] )
    and 6.0 will arrive in 2021
    https://appleinsider.com/artic... [appleinsider.com]

  • Does anyone know if you can can hardware raid these for use in VM servers? My R740 servers are now starting to look slow compared to consumer stuff.

  • 640 KB RAM was future proof, too. For a while.
    What's really future proof is stupidity. Or marketing. Always confusing me.

  • >"The standout feature of this drive is its compatibility with M.2 slots over the PCIe 4.0 interface."

    What took them so long? I have been using a Corsair Force Series MP600 1TB Gen4 PCIe X4 NVMe M.2 SSD in the machine I built for over a YEAR now.

  • It's not future proof, when PCIe 5.0 is already out.

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