The Samsung 980 PRO is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched on September 22nd, 2020. It is available in capacities ranging from 250 GB to 2 TB. This page reports specifications for the 500 GB variant. With the rest of the system, the Samsung 980 PRO interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the Elpis (S4LV003) from Samsung, a DRAM cache chip is available. Samsung has installed 128-layer TLC NAND flash on the 980 PRO, the flash chips are made by Samsung. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are handled more quickly. The cache is sized at 94 GB, once it is full, writes complete at 1150 MB/s. Copying data out of the SLC cache (folding) completes at 900 MB/s. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The 980 PRO is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 6,400 MB/s and 5,000 MB/s write; random IO reaches 800K IOPS for read and 1000K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 150 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Samsung guarantees an endurance rating of 300 TBW, a typical value for consumer SSDs.