Samsung - 980 PRO 500GB Internal NVMe Solid State Drive for Laptops and Desktops

Gaming, video editing and graphic design, I am enjoying the speed up to 6900/5000 mb/s reads and writes keeping up with what I need to do. It is compact and was easy to replace, if unsure, just read the manual. I like that it stays cool while performing at fast speeds. I usually build my pcs with the best of the best and almost every year I replace for better and faster and this is one of those products that play well. Definitely it is an upgrade to have for faster and smoother computer. I also like the Samsung Magician Software, another tool to monitor the health while optimizing and best of all to keep it up to date. It came in a small box nicely packaged and ready to be installed.

I'm currently running this on a Gigabyte Vision D Z490 board, which means it's only running at PCIe 3.0 speeds while on 10th Gen. I'll eventually upgrade to Rocket Lake which will support PCIe 4.0, but in the interim... I cloned my Samsung 960 EVO 250gb drive and moved it to be a game drive, with this 500GB 980 as my primary/boot. The free Samsung Data Migration software cloned the drives without issue. One quick pass with Magician showed the following: 980 EVO 500GB vs. 960 EVO 250GB: Used Space: 95GB / 100GB Written: 578 GB / 14.3 TB Temp: 38C / 34C Read Seq (MB/s): 3584 / 3274 Write Seq (MB/s): 3362 / 1563 IOPS/Random: 344726 / 257324 IOPS/Write: 279052 / 274902 On paper, it's definitely faster and runs a little warmer. I don't necessarily "see" a difference, as my 4yr old 960 EVO was/is fast. I had some gift cards to burn and treated myself to an upgrade while separating my game drive from my primary/boot drive. Would have liked 1TB, but didn't need it in my specific case. If I had a 970 PRO or 970 PLUS, I probably wouldn't have upgraded. As of this post, still no Samsung 980 PRO drivers.

I must say that this Samsung 980 PRO 500GB Internal Gaming SSD is a definite Must Have drive for anyone who seriously considers gaming and any high productivity computing. This little stick has so much to offer and I am glad I purchase it. Installation is quick and smooth. And then the magic begins: in-game menu switching is instantaneous, load times are super fast thanks to its powerful transfer rates. Also this drive delivers 2x the data transfer rate of PCIe 3.0, while maintaining compatibility with PCIe 3.0, so if your PC does not have latest PCIe 4.0 you are still in good hands! I am looking forward to putting this drive to use in my PS5, it will be a definite upgrade. I am very pleased with its performance and cannot even imagine having something faster in the future. I mean this drive is really more than enough for any game user.

I was skeptical of the performance claims of PCI Gen4 NVMe transfer rates, but pleasantly surprised with the noticeable gains in a few of my workflow as a software engineer working with dozens of containers/runtimes going off at once.

I use this SSD with a B550-E Asus Motherboard and a Ryzen 3 CPU, my computer now starts in a few seconds and I'm able to navigate my files samesly.

Fast. Fast. Fast. And the Samsung magician software is a very helpful tool to keep the ssd in check.

Super fast for gaming! Upgraded from my 970 and I can see the difference. This is top of the line for nvme m.2!

Great NVME very fast speeds on my new computer. Will recommend to all to buy. Faster than my SSD and made my games run a bit faster.