“Over the years, Samsung has continuously challenged the limits of high-speed flash memory storage solutions,” said Dr. Mike Mang, vice president of Memory Brand Product Biz at Samsung Electronics. “The new 980 PRO SSD reflects our continuing commitment to delivering exceptional products consumers have come to expect from Samsung.”

Although it had already been leaked, Samsung has now officially launched its latest 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. Based on the standard M.2 2280 form-factor and based on Samsung's own Elpis controller paired up with Samsung V-NAND 3bit MLC (aka. TLC) flash memory, the new 980 Pro SSD offers sequential read and write performance of up to 7,000MB/s for read and up to 5,000MB/s for write. The 250GB and 500GB have 512MB of LPDDR4 cache, while the 1TB version comes with 1GB of LPDDR4 cache. The upcoming 2TB version will pack 2GB of LPDDR4 cache.

Bear in mind that lower capacity drives come with less DRAM cache and have lower performance so the 250GB version pack 512MB of LPDDR4 cache and peaks at 6,400MB/s and 2,700MB/s for sequential read and write.

The random 4K performance peaks at 1,000K IOPS for both read and write on the 1TB version, while 250GB and 500GB models peak at up 500K and 800K IOPS for read and 600K and 1,000K IOPS for write.

The power consumption is around 5mW in L1.2 mode, with 35mW in idle, and up to 6.2W under active usage.

All Samsung 980 Pro SSD models come with a 5-year limited warranty and have a TBW of 150TB for 250GB, 300TB for 500GB, and 600TB for 1TB model. All models come with AES 256-bit full disk encryption, TCG/Opal v2.0, and encrypted Drive (IEEE1667), as well as TRIM, Garbage Collection, and S.M.A.R.T features.

Samsung 980 Pro 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB models should be available soon, probably somewhere early next month with a price set at $89.99, $149.99, and $229.99, while the 2TB model is expected by the end of this year.