Samsung SSD 980 Overview
The Samsung SSD 980 is your typical M.2 2280 (80 mm) drive. On the main side of the drive there is a simple sticker with all of your serial numbers and it also lets you know the capacity. This drive does not come with a heatsink, but the heatsink and sticker are black so it should blend into your motherboard if it happens to not have an M.2 heatsink.
Flipping the drive over to the back we can see this is a single-sided drive. There is a sticker on the back, which actually covers a small piece of copper which is there to help dissipate excess heat.
As I mentioned the SSD 980 makes use of Samsung’s “Pablo” controller. They actually used this controller on their Portable SSD T7 Touch drive. Not a whole lot is known about this controller, but we do know it has half the NAND channels of their other controllers (4 instead of 8) as well as a lack of a memory controller (so no onboard DRAM cache). To get past this the drive uses host memory buffer technology that uses your system’s DRAM instead of an onboard memory chip. The NAND that is being used on the drive is Samsung’s 512Gbit 128-layer 3D TLC.
