Today Samsung announced the latest card in the next generation of solid state drives, the 980 Pro. This new SSD card is designed specifically for data-intensive work, and high-end games running cranked up graphics in 4k or 8k definitely falls into that category.
Utilizing Samsung's new Elpis controller, V-NAND flash memory, and DRAM to fully take advantage of PCIe 4.0 technology, the 980 Pro is supposed to be Samsung's fastest hard-drive ever. Choosing the right graphics card is important, but having fast read/write speeds improves overall performance, which is an asset for today's competitive gamers, whose rigs rely on being able to rapidly access game data.
This announcement comes over two weeks since a leak revealed Samsung's fastest-ever consumer-level hard drives to the public, and the company stayed surprisingly tight-lipped about the development since then. Samsung US teased Twitter users with a warning that they would "need to redefine the word "fast" two days before this announcement.
It's easy to see why the company would make such a claim, since the card can read data sequentially at an astonishing 7k MB/s and write it at 5k MB/s. Random access can be as fast as 1,000K IOPS. That's roughly twice as fast as high-end PCIe 3.0 SSD cards, and over twelve times faster than SATA SSDs.
The card will come in three sizes. The 250MB model will be sold for about $90, the 500MB model will be $150, and the 1TB model will be $230. Compared to the Samsung 870 QVO SSD, which was built with 4-8TB capacity rather than speed in mind, the price points are roughly in-line with what Samsung has been offering so far.
Whether a gamer will consider one or both of these cards for their setup depends largely on the balance they seek to achieve between fast loading and rendering times versus how much space they actually need, as well as the balance of their checkbook. One common tactic for gaming computer builds is to have the OS and games installed to the fastest hard drive, which will boost core performance, and use a second, larger drive to hold other data, such as recordings.
Samsung has been partnering with Gen.G, a global esports organization, to host video game tournaments in Minecraft and PUBG in a clear attempt to make its products appealing to hardcore gamers.
Source: Samsung