What you need to know
- The Samsung 980 Pro is one of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs you can put in a PC, but it's also now a focus for console owners.
- Samsung has confirmed that its flagship SSD is compatible with the PS5.
- Samsung plans to sell the 980 Pro with its own heatsink before the end of 2021.
The Samsung 980 Pro is one of the best SSDs that money can buy, and PC builders have been able to give their machines beast mode performance with this drive for about a year now. But PCIe 4.0 SSDs are no longer just the fancy of PC builders, ever since Sony turned on its long-awaited storage expansion feature.
Sony has a set of strict but not actually that strict guidelines on what SSDs can be used with the PS5, and now the feature is available to all Samsung has confirmed that the 980 Pro meets all of them. So, PS5 owners can buy a 980 Pro, slap it in, and get some god-tier performance backed by Samsung's well-known reliability.
One thing the Samsung 980 Pro doesn't have, however, is a heatsink. I've been using one in a PC since day one and it can get warm. In a PC where it was mounted on the back of the motherboard, for example, temperatures could hit 60C under serious load. In a PC where it's on the front and the air is flowing over it, that comes down quite a lot. Of course, the PS5 doesn't have the freedom of pushing huge lumps of cooling air over the SSD, so a heatsink might be a worthwhile addition.
Samsung has confirmed that with a third-party heatsink the 980 Pro still meets all Sony's guidelines, but it isn't stopping there. Later this year, Samsung hopes to begin shipping the 980 Pro with a heatsink included, which honestly benefits PS5 and PC buyers. No worries about it being able to fit in the PS5 drive bay, and fewer concerns for PC builders. Win-win.
The 980 Pro from Samsung is simply ridiculous. It offers data transfer speeds of up to 6,900 MB/s, so long as you have a PCIe 4.0 compatible motherboard and processor.
