Samsung 990 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD Review

When it comes to high-end SSDs, Samsung has long been a byword for class-leading performance. Not only do they have a history of many of the best-performing drives on the market, but they also make many of the best memory components too. That's why many of their "rivals" actually use Samsung components in their memory and flash storage devices. With that in mind, when Samsung have a new drive coming to market, we're always eager to check it out, as it should be something worthy of our attention. Samsung 990 Pro The new Samsung 990 PRO series is their latest high-performance PCIe 4.0 SSD, so you'll be able to get the best performance from your high-end PC build or even from consoles such as the PlayStation 5. It comes with improved power efficiency and leverages all the tweaks and improvements found in the latest NAND, controller and software that Samsung products. While the drive promises outstanding random read/write speeds, it is also optimised for the DirectStorage API. The Samsung 990 PRO is available in capacities of 1TB up to 4TB to suit your needs. Features MZ-V9P2T0BW (2TB)M.2 (2280)PCIe Gen 4.0 x4NVMe 2.0Samsung V-NAND 3-bit MLC2GB Low Power DDR4 SDRAMTRIM SupportS.M.A.R.T SupportAuto Garbage CollectionAES 256-bit Encryption (Class 0) TCG/OpalIEEE1667 (Encrypted drive) For more information, please visit the official Samsung 990 Pro product page here. 7th-generation V-NAND Featuring Samsung’s 7th-generation V-NAND technology and a newly enhanced Pascal controller, the 990 PRO series realizes the best possible performance in PCIe 4.0 interface. The 990 PRO series delivers sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s, respectively, while random read and write speeds come in at up to 1,400K and 1,550K IOPS, respectively. With up to a 55% improvement in random performance over the 980 PRO, the 990 PRO series is particularly well-suited for heavy gaming as well as creative and productivity tasks. Ultimate Power Efficiency and Reliable Thermal Control Built on a low-power architecture, Samsung’s newly designed controller dramatically improves the SSD’s power efficiency by up to 50% compared to the 980 PRO. Additionally, the 990 PRO series employs a nickel coating on the controller and a heat spreader label on the drive for reliable thermal management. Samsung’s Dynamic Thermal Guard technology further ensures that the drive’s temperature stays in the optimal range. The 990 PRO with Heatsink version offers an additional layer of thermal control while its RGB lights add more style to the drive. The 990 PRO series comes with an industry-leading 5-year limited warranty. Samsung Magician Unlock the full power of 990 PRO. Samsung Magician software's user-friendly suite of optimization tools always gets you the best SSD performance. Protect valuable data, monitor drive health, and get important updates. Your personal SSD toolkit. Packaging & Accessories The box looks really cool, with a nice large photo of the SSD right on the front of the box. As you can see, we have the 2TB model, and in the bottom right, it tells us this drive can deliver read speeds of up to 7450 MB/s. Around the back, pretty much nothing interesting to be found other than a few barcodes that are obviously needed for retail environments. The drive itself is well protected, with a plastic shell holding it firmly in place. In the box, you'll find a little booklet showing you how to install it and some warranty information, but other than that, it's ready to plug and play into your system. A Closer Look It's not surprising that this new M.2 looks like millions that came before it. It's the most common M.2 format, 2280, that meaning that it's 22m wide and 80mm long. This means it's going to be compatible with most motherboards, but importantly, it's also going to fit in the PlayStation 5. Interestingly, the 2TB model is actually quite light and slim. It has two 1TB chips on there, a controller, and the DRAM, all of which are designed and manufactured in-house by Samsung; one of the biggest aspects that give Samsung a performance advantage over many of their rivals. It's certainly rare I see a 2TB drive that's literally all on one side of the PCB, but I suspect the 4TB model will feature the additional two memory chips on the reverse side. Simplicity is no bad thing though, nothing on this side means nothing here to cool or protect, so you can focus all the attention on the other side. The all-black PCB looks great too, and while many builds, you'll likely have this under a heatsink or buried in your system, at least in scenarios where the PCB and sticker are going to be visible, it's not unattractive. Preparation The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn’t used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system. Data We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various fillage scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. The drive will be tested empty and at 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage for this area. We're using Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark for this part of the review. Application and Gaming Besides the synthetic fill tests, the drive is tested with PCMark 10’s storage benchmark to get real-world performance results for various gaming and application usages. Drive Conditioning Durability is a vital factor in NAND-based drives as the chips can only be rewritten so often before they’ll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. Where appropriate, we will test this using Anvil’s Storage Utilities. Following this conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and the same order. Hardware Processor: Intel Core i9 12900KGraphics Card: XFX Speedster RX 6800 XT MERCMotherboard: ROG MAXIMUS X690 EXTREMERAM: Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5200Mhz 32GB(2x16GB)Storage: Seagate FireCuda 530 PCIe Gen 4 2TB M.2 (Primary Drive)Power Supply: NZXT C1000 GoldCase: NZXT H7 FlowCooling: NZXT Kraken Z73 RGB Software Anvil's Storage UtilitiesAS SSD BenchmarkATTO BenchmarkCrystalDiskMark Anvil's Storage Benchmark Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a complete benchmark solution used to test any writeable storage drive. Right out of the gate, the Samsung 990 Pro is delivering some great performance. The Seq 4MB is hitting around 5000 MB/s in this test, but we often see this test coming in lower than rated spec, so that's still one of the fastest scores we've seen here, and it's around 3300 points higher than the Samsung 980 Pro scored. AS SSD Storage Benchmark The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD, and they aren’t using the operating system cache. The copy tests are cached and as such not viable results at this time. Again, a really strong score for the 990 Pro, coming in around 500 points higher than the 980 Pro, not that the new model being fastest than the old one is surprising, but there's only so much room for improvement left in the PCIe 4.0 storage space. ATTO Disk Benchmark The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Another sign of improvement, as this drive gets up to higher speeds straight away compared to the old model, peaking closer to 128KB vs 256KB on the 980, but overall it's faster right across the board. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD and SSD benchmark utility that allows you to measure a drive’s sequential and random performance. All results are MB/s, and higher is better. The drive is apparently capable of 7450 MB/s sequential read and 6900 MB write, but that's in a perfect setup and you will more than likely see that or close to that than not. We scored very close on our test bench, and at 7152/6803 MB/s it certainly outpaced the old 980 Pro, which scored 6600/5010 MB/s How Much Does it Cost? The Samsung 990 PRO 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 is available now from Amazon, with prices of around £280 for the model we tested. However, the 1TB is available for around £155. I actually think that's a pretty great price, especially given the performance figures we've seen, and Samsung has a rock-solid reputation with their reliability and warranty too. Overview While motherboards have now moved onto support PCIe Gen 5.0, there aren't actually any PCIe Gen 5.0 M.2 drives available for consumers just yet. However, PCIe Gen 4.0 is delivering such killer performance for content creation and gamers, that we're not hard-pressed to upgrade to the next-gen just yet. This drive promises performance of up to 7450 MBs sequential read and 6900 MBs sequential write and we got very close to that. That's pretty damn fast, and a far cry from the approximately 550 MB/s read/write you can get from 2.5" SATA6 SSDs. If you did replace an old SSD, you could see game load times be reduced from 30+ seconds to around 2 seconds... I hope you can speed-read those tooltips on the loading screens! High Performance Of course, you may not get the maximum speeds from your system, and in some rare cases, you may even exceed the speeds Samsung promises. It's a high-end drive, so a good quality motherboard, a fast CPU, and having your RAM setup right can all have some impact on it. However, without a doubt, it'll always be a fast drive. Getting the best out of it on your PC shouldn't be too hard though. Furthermore, with it supporting the PlayStation 5, you can upgrade the storage of your console without making a compromise on those super-fast console load times. The Samsung Family Samsung is a prime choice for high-end SSD components, and it's no surprise that their in-house models are some of the best on the market. It uses the latest Samsung in-house controller, Samsung V-NAND TLC memory, and Samsung 2GB LPDDR4 DRAM cache, all working in imperfect harmony. With that in mind, Samsung gives these drives a 5-years limited warranty with the 1TB a 600TBW and the 2TB a 1200TBW lifespan. Should I Buy One? PCIe 4.0 has been with us for a while now, but that means Samsung has had both time and experience on their side to make this one of the fastest and most efficient PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 SSDs we've ever seen, it's a clear improvement in all respects over the also fantastic Samsung 980 Pro. Class-leading performance is always going to get a big thumbs up from us, so it's easy to say we highly recommend the Samsung 990 Pro M.2 SSD.