SAMSUNG 980 PRO SSD 2TB Internal

Cumpre o que promete muito bem. Há uma boa diferença após atualização pelo Samsung Magician. E precisa ser feito num PC com porta nvme.

I was surprised to read some of the reviews on this … Samsung is normally solid as a rock. I’ve used it routinely for my PC’s, I didn’t even think twice about it. When I went to write this review – that’s when I saw others with negative reviews about it.

I read about the firmware failures. I’m not sure what years those were made… because I just did a review on every 970/980 SSD I own… none of them had bad firmware on it. If you’re using something like “Driver Easy” or whatnot to ensure you’re always running the latest drivers on the PC – it’s not an issue I think. It wasn’t for me. Every drive was already running the latest firmware and I’ve been buying 970 and 980 drives since 2019.

In my experience, the NVME drives from Samsung are solid as a rock and perform flawlessly. That’s been the case with this one for my PS5. I put it in this past weekend and it fired up without issue. I didn’t even look at the year or place of origin for manufacture. It just struck me like every other 980 drive I’ve ever purchased except this one has a nice little aluminum/zinc heat sink on it that is Samsung branded (more on the heat sink in a minute – I’m not sure exactly what it does.)

It went in without a hiccup. Granted – you have to know what you’re doing – but if you’ve built a PC before or have any kind of clue, this won’t be hard. Pop a side off, get out a screwdriver for PC builds, pop the expansion slot open, slot it, put it down again (there is a screw and a spacer in the PS5 already but you will need to move the post from the five to the three inch marker), and then close her up. Truly easy… takes like 10 minutes if you have a clue.

The heatsink is low form factor/profile – so it fits like a glove. It’s not entirely clear to me how or why the heatsink is necessary. There’s no circulation in the little bay that the chip sits in – so it’s not clear to me how heat is being dissipated. Moreover, you don’t put any kind of thermal paste on anything, nor use a heat transfer foam liner like you will on some installs where there is a metal casing (like on a GPU).

That said – everyone makes a BFD about having a heat sink because God forbid you don’t have one – the PS5 will explode or something… doubtful… but ok. So anyways… it slots right in, and you close up the lid on it, and it’s sitting in there happy as a clam. I honestly don’t know what the heat sink does. My SSD’s on my PC don’t have a heatsink and they rarely go above 45C or so… given the throttling happens at 80 degrees… I’d think you’d see case deformation on that PS5 case before you’d see your SSD smoking fire inside the little sealed area. And again, with that heat sink on – but no vent – not sure to me where the hell the heat is going other than into the sink which I suspect you’re just relying on the laws of thermodynamics to keep the chip at like 50-60 degrees C… because there is no venting.

I fired mine up with zero difficulties after install.

In terms of performance – there is no measurable performance between the NVME and the onboard memory on the console – which I suspect is probably also a Samsung NVME card. Speed and transfer seem comparable to onboard… and I even sent files back and forth between the SSD and the console memory… no hiccups.

In short – 179 bucks for 2TB. Buy it. 10 minutes after opening the package… you’ll have triple the memory you have on your machine right now.

I mean it’s a no-brainer…

Been using Samsung for years. They are well known and stable.

With this particular drive, there was a firmware issue that locked the drive from being usable. That has since been addressed. I used Samsung Magician to update the firmware upon installing, and found it was already running the latest.

For people using this drive, definitely get a heatsink. Installing an aftermarket heatsink is very straightforward and takes only a few minutes. But Samsung also has a variant of this drive with a built in heatsink. When inserting into the board / enclosure, make sure to slide it in at a 30 degree angle. You’ll know it’s working when the contacts are moving down. There’s usually some friction, so using a bit of force is OK, but still being careful on not bending the pins.

Samsung Magician recognized this drive immediately out of the gate, even before activating it in Windows. You’ll need to go to Window, Disk Utility and create a partition on this drive because it’ll be recognizable. The whole process takes ~30 seconds. I was able to transfer 500+ GB of data onto it upon install, and with the heatsink, it reached 57C. Idles around 45C.

Final thoughts — if you’re looking at using it for an enclosure, then this drive is a bit of a waste, as most USB 3 Gen2 enclosures go only up to 10 gbps. The USB Gen 4 enclosures are much more expensive, but go up to 40 gbps, and still below the max speed of the drive. A cheaper, Gen 3 drive like the 970 Evo Plus would be a better choice if that’s your only use case. However, for PC or Playstation 5, this drive would be a good fit, especially as prices are coming down.

Installed into NVMe slot of this tiny PC without trouble and works with Linux.