New Samsung 980 SSD Improves on 970 EVO, EVO Plus Performance
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
New Samsung 980 SSD improves on 970 EVO, EVO Plus performance:
Samsung's newest generation of midgrade consumer NVMe storage is out today-the new drive is simply dubbed the "Samsung 980," without any suffix. The reviewer guide Samsung provided us compares the new drive to last generation's 970 EVO-we didn't have a 970 EVO on hand, but we did have a 970 EVO Plus and a 970 Pro, so those are the prior-generation drives we'll compare the new 980 to today.
[...] As the data density of NAND cells goes up, their speed and write endurance decreases-it takes more time and effort to read or write one of eight discrete voltage levels to a cell than it does to get or set a simple, unambiguous on/off value.
To a certain degree, this disadvantage can be overcome with parallelism-by splitting the same 1MiB write between eight banks of NAND, you can get much lower latency and higher throughput than you would if the entire 1MiB had to be written to a single bank. This is the major reason that even within the same SSD model, larger capacity SSDs are almost always faster than smaller ones.
In order to accelerate writes beyond that, you need a faster buffer area-which you can get simply by configuring part of your NAND as faster-moving, higher-endurance SLC[*]. The physical media doesn't really need to be different; your SSD controller simply needs to know to treat it that way.
In earlier versions of Samsung SSDs, the SLC buffer area was fixed-but beginning with the 960 EVO, Samsung controllers introduced what it brands "Intelligent" Turbowrite, which is a dynamic amount of SLC buffer configurable by the controller itself. In the 960 EVO and 970 EVO, the "Intelligent" buffer area was a subset of the total SLC cache-the 980 introduces a much larger and, for the first time, entirely dynamic SLC cache.
[*] SLC: Single-Level Cell
MLC: Multi-Level Cell
TLC: Triple-Level Cell
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