The Samsung 980 NVMe SSD may share a naming convention with its cousin, the 980 Pro, but the company may cause some confusion by associating the two. The mighty Samsung 980 Pro is the fastest end-user NVMe SSD we’ve ever tested under just about any kind of load. The 980, while super-affordable, at times resides at the opposite end of the performance spectrum.

The likely reason? The 980 uses your system’s memory as its primary cache, rather than integrating its own DRAM. While it offers decent performance under normal, light use, it suffers major issues with random 4K performance when you bang on it with multiple threads or large amounts of data. If your storage needs are simple this may not be an issue, but we've tested similarly affordable drives without such limitations, such as the SK Hynix P31 Gold that's currently our favorite NVMe SSD. 

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