I've soured on them a bit recently. The 980 Pro firmware bugs hit me on a bunch of machines.
Samsung refuse to use the Linux Vendor Firmware Service that enables fwupd to apply firmware updates (even though Dell resold Samsung products receive updates here. Thanks Dell!).
The official Samsung firmware updater image is/was (for years) broken on modern AMD platforms (guess what I was running all of those 10NVMes in?)
We're doing opposites here, ha. (And I've basically just happened to buy exactly what TheMadnessKing above is looking for, weird.)
Bought a 980 Pro for main PC OS (due to reviews of reliability and long warranty, did not see info about firmware problems). Along with T7 Shield 2TB for movie backups. And stopped buying WD after many years (due to my recent Passport failure and public SanDisk failures). Wish us both luck, may we backup all the things thrice.
Yeah Sammy still makes some of the best drives in the industry. However, the company is pretty scummy. So keep that in mind if customer support is important to you. Also bear in mind, they offer no warranty service from Canada, you will be sent to the US centre and from there, it’s all uphill as they will cite region conflicts, etc. RMA will be hit and miss.
Basically manufacturers now are cutting DRAM from their offerings which means most drives can’t handle large files as that I’ll overflow their paltry buffers and your speeds will plummet to that of a USB drive. WD SN770, Crucial P3, Kingston NV2, all omit DRAM. In fact, most of the cheaper offerings cut the feature on their drives.
As a general rule, I look at DRAM first, then cell type (try to avoid QLC over TLC), controller type can be important if you have specific needs (I purchased a m.2 to CDEF adapter for my Xbox and it only supports drives with a specific controller), and then warranty and product support.
I had watched a video some years ago of LTT about DRAM-less SSD and had been actively avoiding them since then.
Will surely keep these details in mind.