Samsung SSD 980 Pro Review – 1TB & 500GB Capacities Benchmarked

Large File Transfer and Backup File Read

Real World File Transfer

Let’s see how real-world performance was when writing a movie folder containing seven 1080P movies over to the SSD. For this test, we are going to measure write performance by copying a 30.6GB folder of movies off from the drive being tested back to itself to see how performance looks. This action is basically a long linear sequential write operation and punishes the SLC Cache on many drives.

When it comes to writing a bunch of data to the drive without any breaks, the Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB & 500GB models did it faster than any other drive that we have tested to date. The Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB had an average speed of 2025.1 MB/s, which is 43% faster than the old leader on this benchmark test! The Samsung SSD 980 PRO 500GB drive came in with a speed of 1859.7 MB/s and that again is better anything else that we have tested up to this point in time.

Custom Read File Test

The next custom test that we are going to do is how fast each drive can read a compressed folder. For this we backed up a Steam copy of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for the test file. The compressed folder contains 59 titles and is 27.3 GB (29,409,916,771 bytes) in size.

When it comes to reading a compressed Steam Backup file the Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB and 500GB drives finished ahead of the pack by reaching 2249.7 MB/s and 2199.4 MB/s, respectively. This is nearly a 20% improvement over the ‘old’ PCIe Gen 4.0 drives based on the Phison E16 controller.