New Samsung 980 SSD improves on 970 EVO, EVO Plus performance
Enlarge / The fastest storage you'll never see: NVMe drives generally get hidden beneath an aluminum heat sink. In our test rig, that heat sink is also underneath its RTX 2070 Super GPU. (credit: Jim Salter)
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.
A TLC drive by any other name
Samsung 980 SSD (Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.) If you're not 100% up on your NAND storage terms, the first thing we need to talk about is cell levels. The fastest and most durable NAND storage is SLC-the Single Level Cell. An SLC NAND cell has only two values-0 and 1, or if you prefer, on and off. An SLC NAND cell can thus store a single bit of data. From there, we have MLC that can store two bits, TLC that can store three, and QLC that can store four data bits per cell.| Designation | bits per cell | Discrete voltage levels |
| SLC | 1 bit | 2 |
| MLC | 2 bits | 4 |
| TLC | 3 bits | 8 |
| QLC | 4 bits | 16 |
Samsung calls the 980 a "three bit MLC" SSD, which is a lot like referring to a red car as "pink." To justify this, the company leans on the fact that "M" stands for "Multi"-so in plain English, "three bit MLC" could make sense, despite being utter nonsense in the established terminology of SSDs. From here on out, we're going to call it what it is: TLC.
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