Samsung 980 NVME SSD Ditches DRAM, Offers Encouraging Results Costing $129.99 for 1TB

Urian B., Tech Times 09 March 2021, 09:03 pm

Samsung has just recently announced its upcoming SSD which would be a follow-up of the previous 970 Evo called the Samsung 980 NVME SSD. The drive is reportedly an NVMe M.2 PCIe 3.0 drive and it is said to be quite affordable. It would reportedly cost a light $129.99 in order to get a hold of the 1TB version and just $49.99 for the smaller 250GB model.

Samsung 980 NVMe SSD

There is also a reason for the lower prices, it is supposedly Samsung's very first DRAM-less NVMe SSD which has a cost-cutting measure that a lot of other storage manufacturers have been dabbling with in order to get different degrees of success. The Samsung 980, however, still lacks a fast dynamic random access memory that is typically being used for mapping out the contents of the SSD. This would help make things faster and more efficient.

Despite removing the particular feature, Samsung is also touting some particular impressive performance in comparison to some other DRAM-less options due to the drive taking advantage of the said Host Memory Buffer feature in the said NVMe specification. In the reported case of Samsung, it is now tapping up to 64MB of the CPU's DRAM through the PCIe in order to pick up the slack for the SSD.

Samsung Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0

According to the story by The Verge, the result of this innovation would make it similar to the SSD in speed having its own DRAM, but the Host Memory Buffer feature would also help it be able to perform much better compared to a model that would lack it entirely. This is all why buyers will be able to save up on costs. Samsung also notes that this particular SSD can achieve certain speeds up to about six times that of a certain SATA-based SSD.

Samsung's very own Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 feature is also helping deliver the fast speeds through multiplying the max allocated buffer region within the Samsung 980 to as much as a whopping 160GB. This is an increase up from the previous 42GB with the 970 Evo.

SLC vs MLC

This particular feature actually stimulates some fast single-layer cell or SLC performance in the newer Samsung 980. This is despite still using a 3-bit multilayer cell memory or MLC and it's main aim to be able to deliver some sustained performance while still transfering huge files.

Samsung also claims that the newer 1TB version of the 980 is capable of providing a whopping 3,500MB/s sequential read as well as 3,000MB/s write speed. This is quite roughly on par with the previous but still more expensive Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD. The specs can be seen on Samsung's official website. This new technology might be optimized later on for more fairly priced computer components as the prices of other parts, especially GPUs, have soared up in price.

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Written by Urian Buenconsejo