Customer Ratings & Reviews

Samsung drives have always been a reliable choice for us and this 980 NVMe internal gaming SSD should be one more long term, positive experience. Installation in an open SSD slot was straight forward. The price and quality coming from Samsung makes this a nice addition. For typical, daily use for gaming or large files I just don’t see the lack of DRAM in this non-PRO line as being a significant impact for most users. Samsung Magician software provides optimization tools, monitoring of drive health and updates. Full Power Mode can also be enabled to keep the SSD in active mode with no latency. This is a good option to consider for a nice value in a proven brand. The 5 year warranty is great protection should the unusual occur.

Samsung is by far the most known and trusted flash/SSD manufacturer out there. The 980 series represents Samsung’s latest budget NVMe drive, forgoing QLC and bringing the established TLC flash and packing a decent sized SLC cache it can punch above its price bracket’s weight. If those last sentences made 0 sense to you, I’m sorry. But it’s a lot of technical terms to say: Samsung cut the right corners to bring a budget drive that performs while also bringing Samsung’s reliability and reputation. First of all, when talking about an NVMe drive, it’s important to highlight a few positives and negatives here. First of all, this is a 500GB drive, so calling it a gaming drive is an interesting marketing ploy. This is a great OS drive for basic setups that don’t do a ton of professional video editing or frankly high amounts of consistent writes. Does it make an excellent gaming drive? Yes. Does it make an excellent consumer use drive? Yes. DRAM-less drives get quite a bit of flack, as the performance penalty for the lack of DRAM can be tough. Luckily HMB equip drives, such as the Samsung 980 can use DMA capabilities of the PCIe bus to store a small cache optimizing and buffering lookups to where data is stored on the SSD. The result? Under normal circumstances the drive performs like a much more expensive drive. The downsides? Professional use cases will suffer. But gaming is where the HMB drives shine. Not only do gaming workloads not require a lot of random reads/writes, they really only need large sequential reads. The 980 does a great job at sequential reads, putting out nearly the bus maximum of PCIe gen 3 at 3000MB/s. Speaking of raw performance, Samsung’s claims of 3100 MB/s read and 2600 MB/s write are spot on. Running several benchmarks and samsung’s own Magician software show these numbers give or take 100MB/s. Samsung includes the Magician software. Unlike most SSD software, I actually recommend installing this, as not only does it do a great job with diagnostics, but also lets you switch on the full power mode to improve performance. If you’re using this in a desktop (as opposed to something that runs on battery), then I’d recommend turning it on. The SMART diagnostics, benchmarks and scanning are useful tools as well. Being a simple DRAMless drive also gives this drive a lot of installation flexibility. It is single sided, so it’s totally possible to install in thin and light laptops. The drive boasts thermal management capabilities deeper than your standard affair so it should maintain performance even in tight spaces. Under light/normal use cases this drive, coupled with it’s large SLC cache and HMB setup keeps performance flying. Writing more than 100GB will show performance issues, but let’s be real, other than installing Cyberpunk 2077, when will you be writing that much data at once in a gaming drive. Overall, I found this drive to perform better than a QLC drive, and it offers a much better warranty (5 years) and write endurance (300 TBW). If you’re looking for a professional quality drive that can take hundreds of gigabytes of writes a day, look elsewhere. However, if you’re building a gaming PC, this DRAMless drive lets you invest the extra $50-100 elsewhere in your rig while maintaining performance and reliability. Overall, highly recommended!

After three full 8-hour days, I finally managed to replace the 256 GB Samsung NVMe solid state drive that came installed in my HP Spectre x360 Convertible 13-w0XX with a new 500 GB Samsung SSD 980 NVMe M.2 The upgrade is definitely worth it because I was always on the verge of running out of space on the smaller drive. As a public service, I feel compelled to alert laptop owners of hurdles that must be overcome to clone your current SSD to the SSD 980. This won't be relevant if you have a desktop with multiple PCIe slots, which would allow direct cloning. First, be advised that if you want to connect the SSD 980 to a USB port on your laptop, you will need an enclosure that supports NVMe M.2. Until I got the SSD 980, I had been using the ELUTENG M.2 SSD to USB adapter, which works great with NGFF SSDs, but not NVMe drives. But you should also note that the Samsung Magician software that is supposed to support cloning the contents of one Samsung SSD to another will not work with NVMe drive enclosures because it does not recognize the SSD inside the enclosure as a Samsung drive. So you will need third-party software. I went ahead and ordered a new NVMe-compatible enclosure-USB adapter on the web because Best Buy did not carry these enclosures. Since I had several days of waiting for the enclosure to arrive, I decided to try cloning my old SSD to the new one through several steps using third-party software. Without an enclosure to connect the new drive to a USB port, you have to first create a backup image of your old SSD to a portable hard drive. Then you remove the old SSD and insert the new SDD. Next, you need to boot your laptop with a minimalist Windows environment flash drive and perform a restore of the backup image to the new drive. You then might need to fix the boot sector and partitions (I did). I first tried Macrium Reflect, a highly respected software solution for this process. But I was not able to restore the backup. Next, I successfully used two free programs by AOMEI: Partition Assistant and Backerupper. It wouldn't be appropriate in a review like this to go into detail about the various steps that must be navigated in creating a disk image and restoring it, but I should mention that the minimalist flash boot media for these two programs are most easily created from ISO images that can be copied to a flash drive with a free program like Rufus. One of AOMEI's instructions for the process is Be Patient. So true, because creating a backup and restoring it takes hours. But it worked. However, the new drive would not boot. After trying several suggestions that did not work, I found a procedure at woshub.com on repairing the UEFI bootloader in Windows 8 (which also works for Windows 10). Save yourself time if your new SSD does not boot and follow those directions. They involve creating another flash boot drive with Microsoft's Media Creation Tool and running a series of instructions from the command prompt. The last step involved assigning the unallocated space in the new SSD to the C: drive, using AOMEI's Partition Assistant. The end result is a new, fast SSD with twice the space of my old drive. Three days of work was definitely worth it.

I love how fast these ssds are. I build PCs frequently and These are the easiest to just throw in for some fast storage

There isn't much to wonder about here. Samsung is the standard in m.2 drives in my opinion and this was their release for the budget-friendly PC. The Samsung 980 series is an NVMe PCIe Gen.3 drive that consistently performed about 3000/Mbps read speed and over 2000/Mbps write speed for a fraction of what SSD drives used to cost. For under $100 you get access to excellent performance without breaking the bank. This is now my go to SSD m.2 drive for budget builds. It is easy to install and I do not have to worry about quality here. Buy one today and see what SSD is REALLY capable of for the cheap.

good this product works as described 50char 50char

Needed extra storage space on my gaming laptop so decided to install on there. It's an nvme m.2 storage so it is super fast and great for gaming, but also very useful for other software like presentations, or graphical/video software. Must be installed in a m.2 port that supports nvme. After installing you must configure and format the storage or the computer will not recognize it. It is very simple and only takes minutes to format. There are many great videos explaining that process. No complaints, but I may suggest getting a m.2 thermal shield/heatsink. Overall great reliable storage that is super fast in loading.

This Samsung M.2 SSD is excellent! I am using this in my laptop to store games and it is blazing fast. Super easy to install and very reliable. I also use a 1TB version of this drive in my desktop and I am incredibly pleased with the brand and quality of this SSD. If you haven't upgraded to an SSD yet now is the time. You won't be disappointed.

This Samsung NMVe SSD has far surpassed my expectations. I really dig the smaller form factor of NMVe drives and how they make expanding the storage capabilities of a laptop device easy. My Dell G3 gaming laptop has two NMVe bays, one already occupied by the 512GB SSD that came with it. Installing this particular drive was fairly straightforward once I got the proper piece to mount it from Dell. Installation took about 40 minutes and once I put everything together I set it up to hold my games. I didn't run any benchmarks but my perception is that games are installing and loading much faster than when they were on the built in drive. When transferring large files either from the internal drive or an external USB-C drive the time took is better than reasonable, in my opinion. Plus I went from only 500GB of usable storage to 1TB with no sacrifice in speed which is a win in my book. I'll probably acquire a 2TB NVMe drive from Samsung to replace the built in drive and really boost my storage and speed!

This thing is bananas fast. I thought it wouldn’t be a big difference upgrading from a SATA SSD to this and I was extremely wrong. I saw a 600% increase in speed and my loading times have virtually disappeared in games. My only hang up is that it has no heat sinks so make sure your motherboard has some kind of cooling for its m.2 slots. This drive gets extremely hot under prolonged load and sets off alerts in Samsung Magician. Otherwise I highly recommend this drive.

Samsung's new 980 is a great choice for anyone needing a new or additional SSD. It's fast and reliable hitting read/write speeds averaging 3500-3000 MB/s. What really makes this a great deal is the price. In quick searches to compare pricing the 980 is usually cheaper than the previous 970 lineup, by about $20+. So you'll be saving some money for other things.

This drive is very easy to install. The first thing I did was run a performance test on it, and testing was very close to the 3500/3000 MB/s advertised. I haven't had it very long, but it's working perfectly so far.

These sorts of drives continue to get cheaper (for now, there's some rumors they may get more expensive down the road) and that favors all of us as consumers. I've tried this drive with several different games, specifically sports and racing games and it has absolutely done a fantastic job of getting you into the game quickly. I see others have posted benchmarks so I won't get into that but I can tell you from my real world experience this drive is about as fast as you'll get, load times are near instant. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Samsung is a household name especially when it comes to memory components. There is no DRAM, which if you’re asking yourself what DRAM stands for, you’ll be just fine with this SSD. I ran Resident Evil Village and noticed faster speeds than with my standard disk drive. Top read speeds averaged around 3200, but I also didn’t max out the capacity. In average use, meaning you’re not editing gargantuan files or running the drive to the brim, the speeds achieved will be significant improvements over traditional disk drives.

This is my first time installing and using an NVMe SSD drive, the driving force being my daughter’s gaming laptop had only 512GB PCIe SSD (non-NVMe) and she is adamant about consuming drive space! The Samsung 980 NVMe M.2 was at the perfect price point with a solid brand to back the product, having always had good experiences with Samsung it seemed like the best choice for a quick and easy storage upgrade. As I mentioned, this was my first time performing this type of installation, and I am happy to say that it couldn’t have been easier. Simple, no fuss packaging right out of the box and then powering off the laptop and removing the bottom cover, locating the PCIe slot and inserting the drive into the slot. Total time about 5 minutes. Once the laptop was powered back on, I initialized the drive as prompted and she was off to the races. You really can’t beat that! Now she primarily uses the 980 NVMe drive to store the multitudes of games she plays – mostly FPS like CoD and Apex. She says her load times seem much faster and the overall write times are better. I am planning on buying another 980 based on the experience and performance so far to replace the stock SSD that came with her laptop. For the money it really is a no-brainer move and I am happy to give her the best gaming experience possible! Highly recommended!

Samsung's 980 NVMe series SSD are pretty decent for the value. Make sure you know these are not super performing drives or anything like that but from my own experience I didn't notice too much of a difference in Gaming but I've only played CyperPunk 2077 and Valorant on this SSD. It seems to perform slightly better than my 860 QVO but that was a SATA SSD. You really benefit from the bigger drives from what I've researched they have better read and write speeds. Would I recommend this SSD? Yes, for value conscious consumer, I saw other benchmarks comparing this to other similar NMVe SSD and it out performed them.

THE GOOD - Respectable all-around performance for a low-cost NVMe drive - Large SLC cache boosts some write performance over other low-cost drives - Five year warranty THE BAD - Simplistic drive copy software - TLC flash and lack of DRAM make it unsuitable for professional use - No SSD can improve game performance if the game isn't optimized for fast storage THE TL/DR Though some self-appointed "experts" claim the 980 performance is slow due to its design, it's perfectly suitable for everyday computing and very comparable to similar lower-cost offerings from WD, Crucial, and other competitors. Its bigger challenge is its price, which tends to be $10 - $20 higher than those other drives. If you can find it on sale or discount, it's a great choice. THE DETAILS The 980 is Samsung's attempt to get into the lower-cost NVMe market. To cut manufacturing costs, 980 doesn't have a DRAM cache. You may read some self-absorbed experts saying this DRAM-less design is a horrible choice and makes the drive unacceptably slow. But unless any of them can actually explain why that's the case and what the DRAM is for, I'd recommend you ignore them. In short, some SSDs have a small DRAM cache ( similar memory as your system RAM ) to store information about where data is currently stored on the flash cells that make up the drive. DRAM is extremely fast access memory ( nanoseconds instead of milliseconds ) so the drive controller can read the drive data map faster and thus start reading or writing data with less delay. SSDs without DRAM usually must store that data map on the drive itself, which increases latency and response time. The other complaint you may hear about the 980 is SLC cache overrun. What does this mean? Though the 980 uses TLC for the bulk of its storage space ( which writes slower than SLC ) it does have a dedicated section of flash that operates as SLC as a write cache. When data is sent to the drive, that data is first written to the SLC cache to clear the write buffer and then the data is slowly re-written to TLC for long-term storage in the background. If the drive needs to write more data than the SLC cache can hold, the rest needs to be written directly to TLC, which is MUCH slower. In real-world use, both of these complaints are meaningless for 99% of users. Though the 980 has no DRAM of its own, it is capable of using a small chunk of main system ram ( 64 MB or less ) to store the drive data map. It's not as fast as having its own DRAM cache, but it's faster than the alternative. The SLC cache is also over 100 GB on the 500 GB model ( much larger than most competing drives ), meaning you'd have to write more than 100 GB of data all at once in order to overrun that cache. Unless you're buried in video production software or heavy 3D design all day, that's not something you're likely to encounter. The cache shrinks as the drive becomes more full, of course, but no SSD performs well when over 90% full. But even if you overrun the cache on this drive, it will still be faster than most SATA SSDs. It's one thing to say the 980 is slow in benchmarks, it's another as to whether you'll actually notice that "slowness" in your computing use. A slow SATA SSD is still much, MUCH faster than a premium mechanical spindle drive, and a slow NVMe drive is still much faster than a premium SATA SSD. It's one thing to say the drive is 200 MB/s slower than the top drives in heavy use, but when that still means around 900 MB/s ( and even the fastest SATA SSDs don't go above 550 MB/s ), it's safe to say the average user will never even notice that limitation. And though Samsung may want to market this as a "gaming" drive, you won't see any improved gaming performance or load speed over normal SATA SSDs in games that aren't optimized for fast storage ( which is still most games ). The real downsides to the 980 are its cost and its drive cloning software. Samsung still tends to charge a premium for its products, and the 980 is typically $10 - $20 more than similar performing drives from other companies. The drive cloning software to transfer your old drive doesn't recognize all drive partition types and doesn't give you the option to resize the resulting partitions when copying your old drive. This is a big problem if you're using a dual boot OS machine. Instead, I'd recommend using Macrium Reflect, as it has a free version that gives you all these features. As a low-cost NVME, the 980 performs well enough, and its large SLC portion greatly improves performs in some lighter write-heavy workloads. If the price is right, it's a fine option and not one you'd regret. But if you're trying to stretch every penny amidst the rising memory and storage prices, something like the WD Blue or Crucial P5 will give you similar performance for a few bucks less.

I got this my other SSD is 2013 I had to update it fully to Samsung 500GB i opened my dell 15 3505 and found the SSD i had to update it because it was old thanks to best buy for letting me have Samsung SSD 500GB ITS FAST MUST BUY my other SSD is a 250 by dell

Performs as advertised. I increased my computer’s C: drive memory from a 256GB SSD to this 500GB memory.

This M.2 drive is excellent value for the money. You won't get top-tier speeds, but I was hovering around 2 gigs + write and read speeds, so I'm not complaining. The included Magician software makes optimization a breeze as well. This is a definite improvement over similarly priced 500 gb standard 2.5" drives, so if your laptop (or desktop) supports the slot, get this drive.