From The Verge: Samsung has announced its newest SSD, a follow-up to the 970 Evo called the 980. The drive is a NVMe M.2 PCIe 3.0 drive, and it’s an affordable one, too. It costs up to $129.99 for the 1TB version and as little as $49.99 for the 250GB model.
There’s a reason for the low price — it’s Samsung’s first-ever DRAM-less NVMe SSD, a cost-cutting measure that many other storage manufacturers have already dabbled with to varying degrees of success. The 980 lacks fast dynamic random access memory typically used for mapping the contents of an SSD, which would help it quickly and efficiently serve up your data.
Yet despite removing the feature, Samsung is touting some impressive performance compared to other DRAM-less options because this drive takes advantage of the Host Memory Buffer feature in the NVMe specification. In Samsung’s case, it’s tapping up to 64MB of your CPU’s DRAM via PCIe to pick up the slack on behalf of the SSD. The result isn’t as fast as an SSD that has its own DRAM, but the Host Memory Buffer feature helps it perform much better than a model that lacks it entirely — while you reap some cost savings. Samsung says that this SSD can achieve speeds up to six times that of an SATA-based SSD.
Also helping deliver those fast speeds is Samsung’s Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 feature, which multiplies the maximum allocated buffer region within the 980 to as much as 160GB, up from just 42GB in the 970 Evo. This feature simulates fast single-layer cell (SLC) performance in the 980, despite the fact it uses 3-bit multilayer cell (MLC) memory, and it’s aimed at delivering sustained performance while transferring large files.
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