Background on Solid State Drives
Solid-state drives (SSDs) store data electrically, rather than on magnetic disks like traditional hard drives (HDDs). This means there is virtually no delay when seeking a specific bit of data, and there is no physical limitation to how fast reading and writing of data can happen. Instead, the limits come down to the controller inside the drive, the speed at which the individual flash memory chips can transfer information, and the connection between the drive and the rest of the computer.
These drives are available in many physical forms: 2.5-inch (similar in size to laptop HDDs), PCI-Express (which slot into a system like a graphics card), and M.2 "sticks". The more traditionally shaped drives usually connect to motherboards via SATA, just like hard drives do, and that connection itself tends to be the limiting factor in their performance. M.2 drives can use either SATA or the much faster PCI-Express connection, depending on the drive itself and the motherboard it is installed in. There are also U.2 drives, which are close in size to the 2.5-inch models but use a much faster data connection; they are found more often in servers and datacenters than in desktop workstations.
Please note that many CPUs and platforms do not support PCI-E 4.0 yet, and on some motherboards the M.2 slots may not have the full PCIe x4 lanes this SSD is capable of utilizing. In either of those cases, performance will be limited by the speed of the slot. These drives can also get hot during extended read / write operations - moving data in the hundreds of gigabytes range. That is an extreme scenario, and most users will never run into it, but if the drive does get too hot it will throttle down to prevent overheating. That will reduce drive speeds until it cools off, but even in that situation performance is still well above what SATA-based SSDs offer.
This new 980 Pro series from Samsung gains a lot of speed, but also costs less per GB than previous Pro models. The trade-off is that these drives' endurance has been cut in half - likely due to the use of more data-dense memory (3-bit NAND instead of 2-bit). For most use cases, however, that should not be a problem.
Specifications:

Capacity | 1,000 GB |
Interface | PCIe 4.0 x4 |
Cache Size | 1024 MB |
Form Factor | M.2 2280 |
Endurance (TBW) | 600 TBW |
Peak Power Draw | 6.2 Watts |
Net Weight | 0.009 kg (0.0 lbs) |
Performance | |
Sequential Read | 7,000 MB/s |
Sequential Write | 5,000 MB/s |
Random 4KB Read | 1,000,000 IOPS |
Random 4KB Write | 1,000,000 IOPS |
Throughput is limited to 3000-3300 MB/s when used in a Gen3 M.2 slot
Configure a custom computer with the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB Gen4 M.2 SSD.