Samsung is speeding up their SSD line again. With the 980 Pro
series, the NVMe SSDs are attached via PCIe 4.0 allowing new
transfer speeds up to 7000 MB/s read and 5000 MB/s write
speeds depending on which disk size you install.

The 980 Pro series will be initially released in 250, 500 and 1000GB sizes thus allowing for various combinations of system storage. So to tell that you could pop in a 250GB disk for the OS and a 1000GB disk for games. For long-term data storage these disks will be simply too expensive. one could opt in for a 2TB SATA SSD to store large amounts of data at a reasonable price and with Copy speeds of 550MB/s it’s still sufficient speed-wise. They will be solely available as M.2 SSDs as speeds widely exceed the capacity of SATA.

The following chart shows the specs:

	250 GB	500 GB	1 TB
Sequential read	6’400 MB/s	6’900 MB/s	7’000 MB/s
Sequential write	2’700 MB/s	5’000 MB/s	5’000 MB/s
4KB random read (QD1 / QD32)	22k IOPS / 500k IOPS	22k IOPS / 800k IOPS	22k IOPS / 1 Million IOPS
4KB random write (QD1 / QD32)	60k IOPS / 600k IOPS	60k IOPS / 1 Million IOPS	60k IOPS / 1 Million IOPS
Controller	Elpis
NAND type	3 bit per cell MLC (aka TLC)
DRAM cache	512 MB	512 MB	1 GB
Power consumption (maximum / average)	7W / 5W	7.4W / 5.9W	8.9W / 6.2W
Power consumption idle	35 mW
Lifespan	150 TBW	300 TBW	600 TBW
Warranty	5 years
Price (estimated)	189 US$	229 US$	449 US$

There’s no word about pricing yet but most likely the prices might be similar or slightly higher compared to the current 970 Pro models. Samsung, however, did not loose a word about the availablility of the disk at all. Expectations go from Late Q4 ’20 to Q1 ’21.