Save $28 on the super fast Samsung 980 Pro SSD today
Down from $140
The Samsung 980 Pro is one of the fastest and best NVMe SSDs you can buy right now, but its super nippy PCIe 4.0 speeds do come at quite the cost over its older PCIe 3.0 counterparts. Fortunately, Amazon US have knocked a sizable $28 off the 500GB model of the 980 Pro today, bringing its price down to a much more agreeable level than its usual $140 asking price.
Of course, its new price of $112 is still quite expensive for a 500GB drive, but this is still the cheapest it's ever been, according to my Amazon price tracker, beating its previous Black Friday low of $120.
It also puts the cost of a 500GB Samsung 980 Pro just below its nearest competitor, too, the WD Black SN850. This is currently $120 at Amazon US for the 500GB model, and has been for the last couple of weeks. The SN850 is technically a smidge faster than the 980 Pro, at least when it comes to its sequential write speed, but I'll be testing it in full over the coming week to see how its random speeds stack up during every day use.
Remember, you'll need a PCIe 4.0 compatible motherboard to make the most of the Samsung 980 Pro, which at time of writing includes AMD's B550 and X570 boards and (as of yesterday) Intel's just released Z590 boards. However, while Intel finally have a set of motherboards out with PCIe 4.0 support, you'll still need to wait until they release their 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs before you can get a full PCIe 4.0-capable PC, as their current 10th Gen chips don't support it. Intel's Rocket Lake CPUs are currently due to launch sometime before the end of March, but we still don't have an exact date yet.
Of course, there's nothing stopping you from putting the 980 Pro into a PCIe 3.0-based system if you're in the throes of upgrading. It's just that you'll be limiting yourself to PCIe 3.0 speeds until you move over to PCIe 4.0.