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Samsung’s 980 SSD is confusingly named, but this NVMe PCIe 3.0 drive has it where it counts – performance. It supports read speeds up to 3500MB/s, while also costing far less than the firm’s higher-tier Evo and Pro drives. Today the 500GB and 1TB models were discounted on Scan, inspiring copy-cat deals on Amazon.
As it stands, the 500GB model is now cheapest there, at £49.99, while the 1TB model is cheapest at Scan with a price of £94.98. Both of them are within a few quid of the best prices we’ve ever seen for these drives.
So why is the 980 SSD worth considering? Well, Katharine got into the nitty gritty details in her 980 SSD review, but the long and short of it is that this drive outperforms 2.5-inch SATA-based options that were previously the best value picks, by a factor of about six to one. You see, SATA drives are limited by the SATA interface to speeds of around 550MB/s in the very best case, so NVMe drives like the 980 SSD can achieve staggeringly faster sequential reads and writes – up to 3500MB/s and 3000MB/s, respectively.
Random read and write speeds are more similar, so game load times will be only marginally faster overall, but that could change in the future as DirectStorage becomes a thing – and cross-platform titles come to expect the incredibly rapid NVMe SSD storage built into both next-gen consoles. To put it simply, NVMe drives like this one are a much more future-proof proposition, and this is one of the fastest PCIe 3.0 drives available – so you don’t even need a fancy AMD 500-series or Intel 500-series motherboard to use it. Nice.
In any case, these are some of the lowest prices we’ve ever seen on these drives, with the 1TB only dropping to £89 once before, so they’re well worth picking up if you fancy adding on a new drive or you’re building a new PC!