Samsung 990 PRO Review: Not Earth-Shattering, but Sure Is a Solid PCIe 4.0 SSD

Samsung today made available its latest flagship NVMe solid-state drive, the 990 PRO. The company first announced this drive in late August. The new internal SSD aims to replace the previous model, the 980 PRO, that came out more than two years ago.

As it turned out, this latest Samsung SSD still supports PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 5.0, dashing the hope of Samsung SSD fans. That's the bad news.

Even if the drive supported PCIe 5.0, it'd still work with PCIe 4.0 and older PCIe revisions since all generations of PCIe are backward compatible. As is, the new SSD will also fit in a PCIe 5.0 host, which is generally any motherboard that supports Intel's 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs.

The good news is the 990 PRO ups the performance by a small margin and comes with a more affordable price tag than its predecessor. Specifically, the two immediately available capacities—1TB and 2TB—carry the suggested retail prices of $169.99 and $289.99. Each capacity has a heatsink version that costs $20 more to be released in January 2023.

Update: On September 6, 2023, Samsung announced the availability of the 4TB version, which will retail at $344.99. The heatsink version of the drive will cost an additional $10. The company stated that the drive will be available in select retailers starting on October 2, 2023.

Here's the bottom line: With little in the novelty department, the Samsung 990 PRO is not a must-have; but it proved in my week-long testing to be an excellent personal purchase (or a gift) among the upcoming holidays' many tech deals. Keep an eye out for it!

Dong's note: I first published this piece on August 24, 2022, as a preview and updated it to an in-depth review on October 18 after hands-on testing.

Samsung 990 PRO Series: Pushing the PCIe 4.0 Envelope

By itself, the 990 PRO is quite exciting—it's a top-tier NVMe SSD. However, compared with the previous model, the 980 PRO, the new drive has little noteworthy.

It's an incremental step in Samsung's effort to push the performance of the PCIe 4.0 standard a bit further, with little to show in real-world usage.

PCIe Gen	Commercially Available	Rate per lane (rounded)	x1  Speed	x2 Speed	x4 Speed	x8 Speed	x16 Speed
1	2003	2 Gbps	250 MB/s	0.5 GB/s	1.0 GB/s	2 GB/s	4.0 GB/s
2	2007	4 Gbps	500 MB/s	1 GB/s	2.0 GB/s	4 GB/s	8.0 GB/s
3	2010	8 Gbps	984.6 MB/s	1.97 GB/s	3.94 GB/s	7.88 GB/s	15.8 GB/s
4	2020	16 Gbps	1969 MB/s	3.94 GB/s	7.88 GB/s	15.75 GB/s	31.5 GB/s
5	2022	32 Gbps	3938 MB/s	7.88 GB/s	15.75 GB/s	31.51 GB/s	63 GB/s

And that's likely because there's not much left to push. In the 4-lane configuration used in NVMe SSDs, the PCIe 4.0 standard maxes at 7.9GB/s or about 7900MB/s. As you can see in the specifications table below, on paper, the 990 PRO is as fast as PCIe 4.0 can be after overhead.

The 980 PRO is the first of Samsung's PRO NVMe line that supports PCIe 4.0, and the 990 PRO might be the last. With more and more motherboards supporting the PCIe 5.0 standard available, it only makes sense that Samsung will support the new standard in the future. But that remains to be seen.

Hardware specifications: Samsung 990 PRO vs. 980 PRO

The 990 PRO is almost identical to the 970 PRO. The two share the same design and many features and can work interchangeably.

What sets them apart is the fact the former is slightly faster and available only in the 1TB and 2TB capacities.

	Samsung 990 PRO SSD	Samsung 980 PRO SSD
Capacities	1TB, 2TB, 4TB	250GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB
Interface	PCIe Gen 4.0 x4, NVMe 2.0	PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe 1.3c
Design	M.2 (2280)
Dimensions	Naked: 80 x 22 x 2.3 Heatsink: 80 x 24.3 x 8.2 mm
Controller	Samsung in-house Controller	Samsung Elpis Controller
NAND Flash Memory	Samsung V-NAND TLC	Samsung 1xx-layer V-NAND 3-bit MLC
Cache DDR4	1GB (1TB) 2GB (2TB) 4GB (4TB)	512MB (500GB, 250GB)  1GB (1TB) 2GB (2TB)
Security	AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0, Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667)	AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption,  TCG/Opal V2.0,  Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667)
Sequential Read	7,450 MB/s	Up to 7,000 MB/s
Sequential Write	6,900 MB/s	Up to 5,000 MB/s
Random Read	1,200K IOPS (1TB) 1400K IOPS (2TB) (QD 32 Thread 16)	Up to 1,000K IOPS (QD32 Thread 4)
Random Write	1,550K IOPS (QD 32 Thread 16)	Up to 1,000K IOPS (QD32 Thread 4)
Endurance  (Terabyte Written)	2400TBW (4TB) 1200TBW (2TB) 600TBW (1TB)	1200TBW (2TB) 600TBW (1TB) 300TBW (500GB) 150TBW (250GB)
Software	Samsung Magician
Usage Application	Client PCs, Sony PlayStation 5
Warranty	5 years

The same endurance

The 990 PRO shares the same feature set as the 980 PRO. It has built-in hardware encryption and an endurance rating that's half of Samsung PCIe 3.0 SSDs, like the 970 PRO.

Specifically, the 1TB has a life span of 600 terabytes written—you can write up to 600 terabytes to it before it becomes unreliable—and the 2TB and 4TB have double and quadruple that.

Still, 600TB is a lot of data. If you write some 100GB, which is a lot, a day and do that every day to the 1TB version, it'll take some 15 years to wear the drive out. And the 2TB version will take you 30 years.

On top of that, Samsung includes a generous 5-year warranty with its PRO drives. The point is that there's no need to fret about the 990 PRO's longevity.

Familiar specs, now with better power efficiency and thermal control

Samsung says the new drive uses its V-NAND TLC memory as its storage. V-NAND means memory cells are stacked vertically in many layers to increase density at the expense of endurance and performance.

And the low endurance mentioned above results from this type of flash. But the drive has high-performance specs thanks to its controller, which, among other things, has better heat management.

Samsung doesn't disclose the details of the 990 PRO's controller other than calling it "the world's first 8nm controller for consumer SSDs," which "improves its power efficiency up to 50% compared to the 980 PRO."

Samsung says the 990 PRO "employs a nickel coating on the controller and a heat spreader label on the drive for reliable thermal management."

That new design, plus Samsung's Dynamic Thermal Guard technology, helps keep the drive's temperature within the optimal range even during heavy loads. As a result, the 990 PRO can maintain high performance even in extended operations.

Most importantly, the new drive is slated to run cooler than the previous models.

Yet, there's still the heatsink version, like the case of the 980 PRO. But this time around, other than helping to lower the accumulated heat, the 990 PRO's heatsink also works as gaming-related bling integrated RGB lights—similar to the case of the WD BLACK P40.

You can manage these lights, synced with any RGB gear, via the Samsung Magician dashboard software. Clearly, you need to use a gaming rig with a transparent case to appreciate that. And only then are they worth the extra $20.

The familiar Samsung Magician software

The Samsung 990 PRO is a familiar NVMe SSD thanks to the fact it comes with Samsung Magician dashboard software that works with all previous Samsung SSDs.

The latest 7.2 version comes with a more streamlined interface and several features. You can use it to check the drive's status, upgrade its firmware, customize its performance and overprovisioning, manage its RGB lights (when applicable), and other handy tools.

Samsung 990 PRO: Fast performance

I tested a "naked" 2TB 990 PRO for over a week, and the drive proved to be very fast though not consistently or decidedly speedier than the 980 PRO or other high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs, as you will notice in the charts below.

I tested the new drive with its pre-release firmware provided by Samsung. I plan to retest it with the final version when available and will update the charts if applicable.

Specifically, in random access performance, the new drive topped the chart in reading, but its writing performance was behind a handful of others.

The drive took 2nd place on the chart in sequential (copy) tests, slightly slower than the WD BLACK SN850X. However, the differences between the two were within the margin of error.

It's worth noting, though, like the case of other similarly-specced NVMe SSD, the 990 PRO had very high read or write performances individually. But in the combo tests where it did both writing and reading simultaneously, it delivered only slightly over 1700MB/s.

As in real-world, generally anecdotal usage, it was impossible for me to "feel" the difference between the Samsung 990 PRO and most other PCIe 4.0 drives, likely because they all had already come very close to maxing out the standard's bandwidth.

The new drive indeed ran relatively cool in my testing—and I used it in the highest performance setting. I could feel that it got a bit warmer with my finger, but never to the point where I'd call it "hot." It's only safe to say that the heatsink version will be even cooler.

Conclusion

The new Samsung 990 PRO NVMe SSD didn't come with a bang—it would have if it supported the much-anticipated PCIe 5.0 standard.

Instead, it proved to be another familiar and excellent Samsung internal drive you can safely get for your computer or game console. And its reasonable price tag doesn't hurt.

If you're looking to pimp that PCIe 4.0 (or even PCIe 5.0) rig, consider one today.