Cheaper SSDs may soon arrive for the PC community as Samsung’s first DRAM-less SSD—called the 980 NVMe SSD—was officially announced on March 10.
According to KyuYoung Lee, vice president of the Memory Brand Product Biz team at Samsung Electronics, Samsung’s 980 NVMe SSD “brings greater value” to storage without sacrificing NVMe performance. Moreover, the combination of “speed, power efficiency and reliability” makes the SSD “suitable” for electronics consumers primarily in gaming, casual PC users and even including content creators.
The 980 NVMe SSD is also expected to impact laptop consumers as well bringing in power efficiency that is said to be 56% more than its predecessors and will better allow laptops to not only extend its screen time but also lengthen the battery life of laptops in general.
Spec-wise, Samsung’s latest SSD has a PCIe Gen.3.0 x4, NVMe 1.4 is that it is able to sequentially read and write data up to 3,500 / 3,000 MB/s while Random Read/Write speed (QD32) goes up to 500k IOPS / 480 IOPS which is an already impressive feat for a DRAM-less SSD.
The role of DRAM or Dynamic Range Access Memory allows Solid State Drives (SSDs) to have their own cache whenever data is written inside them. Apart from being a cache for the storage device, the DRAM also served as storage for mapping table which records files locations that were stored inside the SSD. As a result, the DRAM allows better performance and faster read/write and loading times
This use of DRAMs inside of SSDs was a standard industry practice until recent years where the use of DRAMs was no longer “necessarily” needed. While not necessarily the smartest choice for consumers, this provided a cheaper entry point for consumers to gain access to faster system boot-up times and marginal loading time improvements in comparison to old hard disk drives.
How cheap is the Samsung 980 SSD? The 980 NVMe SSD will be sold in 3 variants, the cheapest being the 250 GB variant will be sold at $49.99 (roughly P2,450). The 500 GB variant will be sold at $69.99 (P3,430) while the 1 terabyte variant will retail $129.99 (P6,240).
In comparison, current retail prices of SSDs offer a significant difference against Samsung’s latest NVME SSD, prizes taken from Amazon would suggest that Samsung’s Latest 980 Pro SSD with 1 TB storage would retail to $200 (or around P9,600 in local currency) which is $70 more than Samsung’s 980 NVME SSD. Other brands including Western Digital, Sabrent also retails 1 TB SSDs at a similar price range.
For the past years, the limelight of pc-tech innovations has largely been placed at both the CPU and GPU market, primarily in a three-way battle between NVIDIA, AMD and Intel in producing the most powerful chips available in the market. With Samsung’s latest innovation in storage devices, competing companies might soon make the South Korean tech giant a run for its money.
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