Samsung 980 Pro with Heatsink 1TB Review

Until recently, if you fancied sticking a Samsung 980 Pro into your Sony PS5 you had the hassle of searching around for a third party heatsink to keep the thing cool. Not any longer, as Samsung has introduced a new version of the drive that comes factory fitted with a well-designed heatsink. The heatsink adds around 6mm to the height and 20g of weight compared to a standard 980 Pro.

The drive uses a combination of Samsung Elpis controller and in the case of the 1TB drive, two packages of Samsung's 6th generation 1xx layer 3-bit MLC (TLC) V-NAND together with a 1GB LPDDR4 cache IC.

Performance-wise the drive is rated the same as the standard 980 Pro. Samsung quote Sequential read/write performance figures for the 1TB drive of up to 7,000MB/s read and 5,000MB/s respectively, while 4K random performance is rated as up to 1,000,000 IOPS for both reads and writes.

Using CrystalDiskMark 8 we could confirm those Sequential read/write figures with best test results of 7,152.75MB/s for reads and 5,257.07MB/s for writes. When it came to 4K performance, we couldn't get close to the official maximum figures. The best we saw from the drive was when tested with CrystalDisMark 8's Peak Performance Profile, which produced a peak read figure of 633,525 IOPS when using the default profile, while the best write figure of 522,627 IOPS came using the 0 fill option.

The drive features Samsung's Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 technology to improve write performance. The default TurboWrite region of the 1TB drive is 6GB, but if more is needed, up to 108GB can be used as a dynamic SLC buffer, for a total buffer size of 114GB. In the case of the 1TB drive, if the drive has less than 324GB of free capacity, the Intelligent TurboWrite will not operate fully.

If you are wondering which version of the SSD 980 PRO to go for, prices do fluctuate but the better thermal protection of the Heatsink version is rarely more than £10 more expensive than the non-heatsink model, which seems a bit of a no-brainer.

We found the 1TB Samsung 980 Pro Heatsink on offer from Curry's at for £99 HERE. Regular retail pricing that we have observed varies from £120-170.

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Pros

• Heatsink reduces temperatures.
• Overall Performance.
• Magician software.

Cons

• Couldn't match the official 4K figures during testing.

KitGuru says: Samsung bringing out the Heatsink version of the 980 Pro at least means you use the drive in a PlayStation 5 out of the box without resorting to a 3rd-party cooling solution.

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