Samsung's 980 Pro Heatsink 1TB is down to £92 after a 36% price drop
The former flagship still offers excellent PCIe 4.0 performance.
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Samsung's high-end 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 SSD has dropped in price on Amazon UK, and now costs £91.82 for a 1TB model with preinstalled heatsink rather than the £125+ it normally costs. This is an awesome price for one of the fastest SSDs on the market, with the advent of the even faster (but significantly more expensive) 990 Pro pushing the previous flagship to nearly bargain basement territory.
We reviewed the 980 Pro back in 2020, when it was one of the first 'second-gen' PCIe 4.0 SSDs to push beyond the 5000MB/s barrier, ending up with up to 7000MB/s sequential reads, up to 5000MB/s writes and class-leading random performance with up to 1000K (aka 1M) IOPS reads/writes - which is right up there with the best of the best. That resulted in some great IRL performance, fast load times etc., but still a recommendation tempered by its high price - £208 for the 1TB model without a heatsink back then! To get the premium version of the drive for less than half that price is real progress, and with more PCIe 4.0 capable systems out there, it's time for the 980 Pro to hit the mainstream.
Note that the 980 Pro was in the headlines recently for the wrong reasons, with some 2TB models facing an issue where the drives suddenly flipped into read-only mode, rendering them unusuable as OS drives (although recoverable via cloning). This can be prevented by a firmware upgrade to the new version 5B2QGXA7, so it's worth doing this even on the 1TB size of the drive that shouldn't be affected. This doesn't affect my recommendation, but is something to be aware of!
Similarly, while this is a PC site through and through, it's worth underlining that this drive could also be popped into a PS5, thanks to those impressive speeds and the built-in heatsink.
I think those are all of the details covered - so do consider this drive if you're in the market for a speedy 1TB model with heatsink at a great price, but don't forget that firmware update to be on the safe side!