Review on SAMSUNG (MZ-V8V1T0B/AM) 980 SSD 1TB - Enhanced M.2 NVMe Solid State Drive with V-NAND Technology by Sean Andrews

Excellent NVMe drive for the price, what wasn't entirely clear was the corners that were trimmed to get this attractive price/performance combo. Short answer: This drive does not have a dedicated drive onboard, most Samsung NVMe drives have a dedicated drive chip that is used for buffering command queues, so in a situation where the drive is asked to extract multiple small files at once . or write a few small files at a time, dram will help you queue those commands and get the most out of it. This drive lacks that dedicated storage, but while this has proven to be a performance hit in the past, Samsung pulled the rabbit out of the hat and actually implemented a system that works damn well when using system memory. So in configurations with very low RAM this drive may not perform as well, in most typical cases (8-16 GB system RAM) this drive will perform as well, if not slightly better than 970 as you might expect Evo NVMe (see image for test results). overall the slower of the two is my 970 Evo and the 980 is the other). That being said, I'm not sure if I'd use this drive as a primary OS drive or in some sort of home file server or game server, but it's fine for most people as a primary OS drive, while not necessarily offering optimal speed, but it's fine as an additional drive to store videos/games/music/photos. If you're looking for a basic drive I'd probably still direct people to either the 970 Evo (or better) or some other dedicated storage drive, but if you're looking to save money with minimal compromise or just need an extra NVMe drive, it probably fits in every way.