Question NVMe SSD upgrade help

[krisztianj]

Hi Experts,

I need some help please. I have an old-ish Asus Maximus IX Hero motherboard with PCI-E 3.0. Looking for an NVMe SSD upgrade as my current Hynix 256GB just doesn't cut it any more. I wanted to buy the Samsung 970 Pro 1TB (MZ-V7P1T0) which is one of the fastest PCI-E 3.0 SSDs but the price is £219. I then looked at the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB (MZ-V8P1T0BW) for £189 but that is PCI-E 4.0. Is it worth getting the 980 Pro or is it not backwards compatible? Will it run as fast as a 970 Pro would or it would be slower?

Many thanks for your help!
Krisztian

 

[UsandThem]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16087/the-samsung-980-pro-pcie-4-ssd-review/9

By most measures and for most use cases, the 980 PRO is actually superior to the MLC-based 970 PRO. The addition of PCIe 4 support helps the 980 PRO deliver higher speeds than its predecessors, even though that's more forward-looking than an immediate benefit. The shortcomings relative to a hypothetical MLC-based PCIe 4 drive are also mostly hypothetical; workloads that truly require more write endurance than the TLC-based 980 PRO can provide should probably be handled by an enterprise SSD rather than any consumer/prosumer product.

Performance wise, the 980 PRO will be slightly faster at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds, but if you are a super heavy data writer, the 970 PRO has a higher TBW warranty since it uses MLC NAND. All of the pro/cons are listed in the review.

 

[krisztianj]

Thanks a lot for the quick response. Fully answers my question. I shall go for the 980 Pro then.