PC vs PS5: The new Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 SSD brings next-gen console challenging speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s for desktop computers

There will be some heated discussions between PC gamers and PS5 enthusiasts over the coming days thanks to the official release of the Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD. The drive was originally unveiled at CES 2020 back in January, and it seems like it has been a long wait for the product to finally see the light of day. However, Samsung is now advertising the stupendously fast SSD for sale in certain markets (Singapore). No doubt key markets, such as Europe and North America, will follow soon.

The 1 TB Samsung 980 PRO is the Usain Bolt of the three new SKUs (1 TB, 500 GB, 250 GB). It can reportedly reach a maximum sequential read speed of 7,000 MB/s, which obviously also depends on the system and hardware it is working alongside. A sequential write top speed of 5,000 MB/s is also mentioned with the SSD utilizing the custom Samsung Elpis controller. In regard to random write and read performance based on 4KB QD32, the 1 TB Samsung 980 Pro can reach one million IOPS (input/output operations per second).

Although the 250 GB and 500 GB variants of the Samsung 980 PRO are a little slower than the 1 TB SKU (see table below), they are still blazingly fast in comparison to PCIe 3.0 SSDs and huffy old SATA SSDs. In fact, Samsung claims the new 980 PRO models are up to twice as fast as the PCIe 3.0 variants and 12.7x faster than SATA models. Nickel coating and Dynamic Thermal Guard technology is incorporated to make sure the new SSDs don’t suffer from heat-related performance issues.

The 1 TB Samsung 980 PRO can certainly give the PS5’s vaunted SSD a run for its money with the 7,000 MB/s max read speed holding up very well against the next-gen console’s reported rate of 5,500 MB/s for dealing with raw data. However, the PlayStation 5’s SSD can also apparently handle uncompressed data at magnificent speeds of a typical 8-9 GB/s (decompressing via Kraken). Regardless of the measurement differences, it’s likely PC gamers will be delighted with the performances of the new Samsung 980 PRO SSDs. No official prices have been released yet, although the 1 TB Samsung 970 PRO currently costs around US$315.

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