Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Linux Performance

The Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drives are now available from Internet retailers. For those wondering how these SSDs compare with EXT4 under Linux against other PCIe 4.0/3.0 drives, here are a variety of benchmarks.

While Samsung hasn't sent out NVMe SSDs for Linux testing at Phoronix, we continue purchasing the new models due to their high performance state and needing some additional drives for various systems in the lab. When the Samsung 980 PRO reached retail channels this month I picked up the Samsung 980 PRO 500GB and 1TB drives and ran a series of benchmarks on them prior to commissioning.

The Samsung 980 PRO series features read speeds up to 7000MB/s and writes up to 5000MB/s. These M.2 2280 SSDs are Samsung's first consumer drives to market with PCI Express 4.0 support. The Samsung 980 PRO series makes use of the Samsung Elpis controller and 128L 3D TLC NAND memory.

The Samsung 980 PRO is available this month at $230 USD for the 1TB capacity or $150 USD for the 500GB capacity. There is also a 250GB model for $90 USD while the top-tier 2TB version hasn't yet hit retail channels.

Atop Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS with a Ryzen 9 3950X test bed running the Linux 5.9 Git kernel I tested various NVMe SSDs with this configuration and freshly formatted to EXT4 each time and using the stock mount options. The drives tested for this brief Samsung 980 PRO Linux comparison included the Corsair Force MP600 1TB/2TB drives, Sabrenet Rocket 4.0 1TB, Corsair P2 500GB, and Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250GB for an interesting look at these recent NVMe solid-state drives.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of Linux storage benchmarks were carried out.