Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Linux Performance

Should you be interested in these consumer drives for running a PostgreSQL development server or the like, the Corsair Force MP600 and Rocket 4.0 drives were faster with this being another database workload where the standard Samsung NVMe SSD performance comes up short.

When looking at the geometric mean of all these Linux storage benchmarks carried out for this article, the Samsung 980 PRO series was better off that older PCIe 3.0 drives like the 970 EVO Plus, but the 1TB Corsair Force MP600 and Sabrenet Rocket 4.0 both were delivering better performance on Ubuntu with the Linux 5.9 kernel. The read performance of the Samsung 980 PRO series under Linux was great but it seems at least under Linux these retail 980 PRO drives really struggle with write performance against the other PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs tested on the same system and same kernel. Thus at least for now with the current firmware the Samsung 980 PRO is rather a disappointment for Linux users.

Thermals weren't any issue with the 980 PRO with the 1TB model under load being very steady throughout all of the testing at around 42 degrees and a peak of just 43 degrees.

Those wishing to benchmark their own Linux system(s) against these results can install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 2010158-FI-SSDBENCHM79 for your own fully-automated, side-by-side benchmark comparison.