Samsung 980 Pro with Heatsink 1TB Review

The Samsung 980 Pro with Heatsink comes in a stout box with an image of the drive on the front, above which is a sticker showing the drive's capacity. Under the image, there is a note of the drive's maximum sequential read speed –  7,000MB/s.

The rear of the box has a multilingual list of where to find additional warranty and Product information.

The 1TB 980 Pro is built on a single-sided M.2 2280 format PCB. Under the heatsink sits a Samsung Elpis controller, two packages of Samsung's 6th generation 1xx layer 3-bit MLC (TLC) V-NAND and a 1GB LPDDR4 cache IC.

The heatsink is a 2 piece design being held together with 6 tiny screws. The drive sits in between two layers of TIM (Thermal Interface Material). The Samsung controller also plays a part in heat dissipation as it has been coated in nickel.

Samsung’s SSD management utility goes by the name of Magician and can be downloaded from Samsung’s website. We used version v7.0.1 with the SSD 980 Pro Heatsink. The software is constantly updated and graphically refreshed and it has come a long way in usability since its first versions.

Magician allows you to do most maintenance jobs you may need to do with an SSD; updating firmware, optimise performance, adjust the Over Provisioning, enabling data security (the drive supports AES 256-bit full-disk encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0, and Encrypted Drive -IEEE1667 (MS eDrive ) ) and securely erase the drive. Magician also features a built-in benchmark tool.

The one thing still missing from Magician is any form of integrated data migration tool, but you can download a separate migration tool from Samsung’s website, but it would be nice if Samsung would see fit to build it into Magician one day.

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