The Samsung 980 is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched in September 2020. It is available in capacities ranging from 250 GB to 1 TB. This page reports specifications for the 500 GB variant. With the rest of the system, the Samsung 980 interfaces using a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the Pablo (S4LR033) from Samsung, a DRAM cache is not available. Samsung has installed 128-layer TLC NAND flash on the 980, the flash chips are made by Samsung. Please note that this SSD is sold in multiple variants with different NAND flash or controller, which could affect performance, the "Notes" section at the end of this page has more info. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are soaked up more quickly. The cache is sized at 122 GB, once it is full, writes complete at 400 MB/s. The 980 is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 3,100 MB/s and 2,600 MB/s write; random IOPS reach up to 400K for reads and 470K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 70 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Samsung guarantees an endurance rating of 300 TBW, a typical value for consumer SSDs.