Today’s A-list titles can take up 200GB 2 or more of storage. A range of capacities from 1TB to 4TB 2 means you get to keep more games at the ready and get into the action fast. Take advantage of irrational PCIe® Gen4 NVMe™ speeds up to 7000MB/s 2 read and 5300MB/s 2 write (1TB model) for a responsive and seamless gaming experience. Samsung also has an advantage when it comes to brand and reputation. For years, Samsung’s SSDs have been leading in the market. And it’s usually the choice of enthusiasts, gamers, and system builders. However, this time, WD was able to outperform Samsung’s top-of-the-line SSD. Although, not by a huge margin. The Samsung 980 Pro SSD is a PCIe 4.0 Gen4 SSD; meaning the older generation or system may not support this drive. The only system that currently supports this type of SSD is an AMD X570 or B550 motherboard; powered by (at least) an AMD Ryzen 3000 CPU. Of course, the latest Ryzen Threadripper supports them as well. Intel’s upcoming Z590 motherboards and some Z490 motherboards paired with the latest 11th Gen Intel Core CPUs will also support Gen4 SSDs. Again, you can install this on a PCIe 3.0 M.2 slot, but the speed will be limited to around 30Gbps. Below are the specifications of the system I used to test the 980 PRO 2TB capacity. Operating System

WD_BLACK SN850 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 NVMe Gaming SSD up to

Store and play more titles on a drive that’s officially tested and certified for your PS5™ console 4, so you can keep gaming without worrying about compatibility issues. With up to 2TB 1 capacity, your PlayStation®5 console has the additional space to store up to 50 games 3 so you still have room for the next big title. Both the 980 Pro and SN850 are excellent Gen4 SSDs. You can’t go wrong with any of these drives. However, with a Samsung SSD, you can take advantage of the company’s proprietary software; like the Magician and Data Migration. Samsung’s Magician software is simply well polished and ahead of its competition. WD also has an SSD tool kit, called the WD Dashboard. But WD doesn’t have proprietary migration software.

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On the PCIe 4.0 side, the Phison E18controlleris in a number of drives on the market as it was the first PCIe 4.0 NVMe controller to break cover in consumer-focused storage drives with better than PCIe 3.0 speed but not really testing the limits of PCIe 4.0 - plus it is known to be a toasty implementation. Due to a level of system maturity, to date we haven't tested an E18 drive, but our first Phison E18 SSD sample arrived yesterday. We're currently testing through it, especially with the latest firmware which fixes a few issues.That means that this review won't be able to declare an outright winner for the consumer SSD performance crown, but that's not a big deal. Just like when high-end SSDs were all bumping up against the limits of PCIe 3.0, small differences in benchmark scores between today's high-end PCIe 4.0 drives will not be noticeable during any normal real-world usage. These drives are already overkill for most purposes, and which one is technically the fastest is mostly a matter of bragging rights.Also on the market is the novel ADATA XPG Gammix S70 SSD with newcomer Innogrit's high-end SSD controller, which we have in hand but have not yet tested with the latest firmware. Also of interest are two of the most premium SSDs from the PCIe 3.0 era: the 1.5TB Intel Optane SSD 905P and the Samsung 970 PRO. The 970 PRO was the last high-end consumer drive to use MLC NAND, which gave it a significant advantage on heavy, long-running storage workloads as compared with TLC SSDs that use SLC caching to provide improved peak performance. The 970 PRO is old enough that newer, faster TLC NAND is catching up even in tests where MLC used to be a major advantage—and of course the latest and greatest TLC drives with PCIe 4.0 have far higher peak performance. Intel Optane SSD 905P A new suite of features comes with the SN850X including Predictive Loading, Overhead Balancing and Adaptive Thermal Management 5. Designed with an M.2 2280 slim, light, and compact form factor to easily slide into your gaming rig. In this test, the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB outperformed the SN850 in the sequential test. However, both newer Gen4 drives performed poorly during the sequential write workloads. Although, it wasn’t the case when it comes to the 4KB random workloads. Both the 980 Pro and SN850 performed well; with a read and write speeds of above 2,000MB/s. PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark Results

2TB vs WD Black SN850 2TB - Which is Review: Samsung 980 PRO 2TB vs WD Black SN850 2TB - Which is

In the ATTO Disk benchmark, we see a similar result to the AJA system test. Both benchmark tests are based o sequential speeds. But ATTO Disk benchmark shows the maximum theoretical speed of a storage drive. Engineered and built with Western Digital 3D NAND to give you the reliability and endurance needed to sustain pro-level performance. We can see that the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB capacity is behind its advertised speed of 7,000MB/s sequential read and 5,100MB/s sequential write. It is quite uncommon for a Samsung drive to miss or falls short of its advertised speed by a substantial margin. At least based on the Samsung drives I have tested before. Perhaps I should re-do the benchmarks using a Z590 motherboard powered with one of Intel’s newer 11th gen CPUs soon. CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Results The most important competitors for the SN850 are other PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs. We have results for both the Samsung 980 PRO and the Silicon Power US70 based on the older Phison E16 controller. Our 980 PRO results are using newer firmware than our initial review of that drive, and we've added results for the 2TB model alongside our 1TB results. Western Digital SN850SN850 with heatsink is intended for Desktop PCs and PlayStation™ 5 (PS5 system software version 21.02-04.00.00 or higher required). Western Digital doesn't give us detailed performance specifications the way Samsung does, but the basic specifications make it clear that this drive is aimed at the very top: sequential reads up to 7GB/s are pushing the limits of the PCIe 4.0 x4 interface that is still catching on in the consumer market, and random reads at 1M IOPS from a single M.2 drive were just a dream a year ago. Overall, these peak performance specs line up pretty well with the Samsung 980 PRO: Samsung quotes higher random write performance, and WD quotes slightly faster sequential writes.