The folks at Tom's Hardware dug up some juicy info about Samsung's upcoming NVMe SSDs. According to the site, the company is readying up two series of consumer SSDs labeled Samsung 970 and Samsung 980, forgoing the well-known Evo and Pro branding. The information is corroborated by a listing for a PM981 SSD that appeared at Vietnamese seller Saiback over the weekend. For reference, PM-series drives are Samsung's OEM counterparts of their similarly-numbered consumer SSDs.
If the information at the Saiback store is taken at face value, the new drives offer tantalizing performance from Samsung's in-house Polaris 2 controller and latest 3D NAND flash chips. The smaller 512 GB model boasts sequential speeds of 3000 MB/s when reading and 1800 MB/s when writing. That drive touts 270K read IOPS and 420K write IOPS performance, to boot. The larger 1 TB model is faster, reading at up to 3200 MB/s and writing at as much as 2400 MB/s. Random performance is also faster with 380K read IOPS and 440K write IOPS.
Drives posted for sale on Chinese site Taobao have better photographs of what appears to be a thin metal heat spreader mounted atop the drive's controller. The drives are built to the familiar M.2-2280 form factor and use four PCIe 3.0 lanes.
The 512 GB Samsung PM981 is listed for sale at Saiback for 5.2 million Vietnamese Dong (about $230) and the 1 TB model is for sale for 9.9 million of the same currency units (about $435). Although these prices may not accurately reflect the pricing of the drives in the United States, the figures look reasonable enough for the performance and capacities on offer.