980 NVMe SSD 500GB
Game changer
05/18/2021 03:01
Tested this baby against 2 other different leading competitors NVMe SSD drives as a secondary multimedia drive(standard formatting options, Default allocation size). Ran three real world tests on all three drives. I have decided to snatch these up to replace all three of my M.2 drives with these. My decision comes from editing video and building PC's for Multimedia professionals(graphics, video, webmasters, coders) for the past 15 years or so.
Installation
Easy, breezy. I have a huge top end laptop meant for video editing on the go. If any hardware has extra heatsinks, thicker chips, etc, it will not fit. 980 PRO slipped in without issue or modification to the housing of the drives. Initialized the drive, downloaded the software, updated firmware in under two minutes. This product is good for your little to big workstation setups and is not a IT nightmare. I would note that for bigger workstations, you will probably need more storage than 500GB since typical high-end motherboards support 3 M.2 drives with 2 lanes of bandwidth.
4K video export
In older HDD's and SSD's(non M.2), I found the temperature to rise quite a bit when using either to export from or to. With M.2 drives It got even less. The 980 PRO never broke a sweat. Granted, I am pumping out master files at an average speed of 56mbps which is a low level hum in the performance aspect of the drive, but it stayed the same temp. This should mean a longer lasting drive with less dead spots over time.
File Transfer
I just threw a mix of files together(100GB total, all different sizes) and transferred to see. Topped out at 1.8GBps with no dips. Other drives topped out at 1.6 and wavered between 1.2 to 1.6GBps. The heat rose less with the 980 PRO and plateaued at a lower temp than the others. Read write functions to itself(duplicated the files on the 980 PRO) resulted in a dip to 1.6GBps and still outperformed it's peers.
Final Opinion
Only having a 500GB storage meant I could not test this drive as an OS drive. I do surmise that for a graphic design professional or a gamer, this would be the perfect OS drive as its read write capability is higher and runs at a lower temp. Even transferring files felt snappier(request to response time). Like I already stated, this drive is going to replace my others.
FlippantPhoenix
Corvallis , Spojené státy americké
Age: 42
Gender: Female