There are a lot of contenders vying for the title of the fastest NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, and Samsung is definitely up there with the 980 Pro. The Samsung 980 Pro was one of the first next-gen drives to be released, offering much faster transfer rates to the initial batch of PCIe 4.0 drives. And while it was pricey at launch, Samsung has been nibbling away at its sticker price for a while now. Indeed, it is now offering a massive $100 saving for the drive on its own website.
Part of the reason for this price tweakery is because there are now faster drives available, so this is Samsung staying competitive. Importantly, the speed difference between the top drives can be very slight though, and the differences can be slight across various benchmarks and in the real-world tests. The Samsung 980 Pro is nipping at the heels of our top pick, the WD_Black SN850 in plenty of tests, and it can beat the likes of the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus in some tests too.
It's competitive still, basically, and that means that a $100 saving is worth sitting up and taking note of. Getting a seriously-fast 2TB NVMe SSD for a penny under $330 is a solid deal and you'll end up with a drive that will last you for years. It'll be fast enough to make the most of Microsoft's DirectStorage when it eventually releases, but in the meantime, you'll get to enjoy speedy transfers in Windows right now as well as game loading times as good as they currently get.
Of course, $330 is still a fairly serious chunk of cash, but if your needs are a bit more modest, then you can grab the 1TB Samsung 980 Pro for $169.99 instead. That's still a big enough drive for the vast majority of your games, and while the saving isn't so huge compared to the MSRP, it's still a $60 saving that can be squirrelled away for upgrading another component later on.
Whichever size you go for, it's worth noting that you'll need to be running either a Ryzen 3000-series or Ryzen 5000-series or Intel 11th or 12th Gen platform to make the most from this drive. Anything earlier than this and you'll be accessing the drive over PCIe 3.0, which will cap the performance at 3,500MB/s—which is still very fast, but almost half of what the drive is capable of.
If this isn't quite what you're looking for, but you do wish to upgrade your system's storage, then be sure to change out the best SSD for gaming roundup for ideas.
