At one time, many were very pleased with the news that third-generation Ryzen processors would be friends with the PCI-E 4.0 bus. Particularly bright prospects loomed for SSDs, which seemed to finally push off the ground and fly as they should. One of the first companies that presented a new format drive was, of course, Samsung. The main advantage of the Pro series over the competition lies in the use of Samsung's own assembled memory processor Elpis instead of hastily assembled controllers from Phison and Silicon Motion.


Thanks to all these factors, the PRO models provide data transfer speeds twice as fast as before with the PCI-E 3.0 interface. For example, for the Samsung 980 PRO drive, a read speed of around 6400 MB / s is claimed. For comparison, the most current model from the EVO series will not be able to squeeze out more than 3500 MB / s. To maintain the claimed speed and not be afraid of drawdowns, Samsung used 128-layer 3D TLC V-NAND flash memory with an increased level of reliability and wear resistance, and when manufacturing the Elpis memory controller, they switched to a modern 8 nm process technology.

This combination of features ensures that the Samsung PRO delivers superior performance as a system drive for an ultra-fast work laptop, as the main drive in a workstation, or as storage for a collection of games in a progressive gaming PC. Whatever one may say, using an SSD with similar characteristics significantly increases the loading speed and responsiveness of the system itself, and in games it helps to “go through” loading screens faster and load assets faster in open world games.