Samsung SSD 980 offers a speed of up to 3,500 MB/s at a fair price, but without DRAM

The Samsung SSD 980 is the first NVMe SSD for PC from Samsung that completely dispenses with DRAM. The manufacturer wants to lower the price, while the supposed disadvantages of the missing DRAM is to be compensated by the host memory buffer technology (HMB).

The Samsung 980 is aimed primarily at price-conscious customers who still do not want to forego decent speed. It is an M.2 SSD that is connected via PCIe 3.0. The manufacturer promises sequential read and write speeds of 3,500 MB/s and 3,000 MB/s, respectively, the random read and write rates should be a remarkable 500K IOPS and 480K IOPS.

The host memory buffer technology allows the SSD to access the system’s RAM directly instead of relying on its main memory. The energy efficiency is said to have been improved by up to 56 percent compared to the SSD 970 EVO. A first test of the SSD from ComputerBase shows that this approach from Samsung only partially works.

According to this, the read speeds are okay, but the write types break down to just 400 MB/s with larger amounts of data that exceed the SLC cache. With an 80 percent full SSD, the slower TLC memory should be accessed directly after 10 GB to 40 GB of written data, depending on the capacity.

The Samsung 980 SSD for PC can already be ordered from Amazon.com and Bhphotovideo.com online websites. The SSD is available with a capacity of 250 GB, 500 GB, and 1 TB for $49.99, $69.99, and $129.99.

Recently, Samsung has also announced the EVO 870 solid state drive is suitable for use in desktops and laptops. The Samsung Evo 870 is made in a 2.5-inch format with dimensions of 100 × 69.85 × 6.8 mm. The microchips of flash memory Samsung V-NAND MLC and the controller Samsung MKX are used.