Samsung SSD 990 Review (vs. 990 Evo Plus): New but Not Novel

The Samsung SSD 990, announced and available today, is a bit unanticipated. Before this, Samsung had already had a trio in the 990 family: the 900 PRO, 990 Evo, and 990 Evo Plus.

On this front, the company says the new SSD “joins our existing lineup of Gen4 NVMe drives […]. It’s Samsung’s new all-purpose Gen 4 SSD that balances performance, capacity, and value.“

Translation: It’s simply another NVMe Gen 4 option. And the drive indeed proved to be a comparatively subdued experience in my real-world testing.

Here’s the bottom line: The Samsung SSD 990 has nothing of note, if not a downgrade, compared to previous models, but if you’re in the market for a reliable Samsung internal drive, it’s worth consideration, given its friendly pricing in the face of component scarcity caused by AI.

SSD 990: A familiar Samsung NVMe Gen 4 SSD with lower endurance

Unlike the immediately previous models, the 990 Evo and Evo Plus, the new Samsung SSD 990 is not a hybrid PCIe Gen 5/PCIe Gen 4 drive. Sure, you can use it in a PCIe Gen 5 M.2 slot, but it’ll always perform at PCIe Gen 4×4 speeds.

And as a PCIe Gen 4 drive, it’s a downgrade from the Samsung 990 PRO, with lower specs. What’s more, it also has the lowest endurance among Samsung NVMe SSDs. The table below compares the hardware specs and feature sets of the three Samsung SSDs

Hardware specifications: Samsung SSD 990 vs. 990 EVO Plus vs. 990 PRO

	Samsung SSD 990	Samsung SSD 990 EVO Plus	Samsung SSD 990 PRO
Interface	PCIe Gen 4×4 NVMe 2.0	PCIe Gen 4×4 or PCIe 5×2, NVMe 2.02	PCIe Gen 4×4 NVMe 2.0
Form Factor	M.2 2280
Storage Memory	Samsung V-NAND 3-TLC
Controller	Samsung In-house Controller
Capacity	1TB, 2TB	1TB, 2TB, 4TB
DRAM	Dram-less		1GB (1TB) 2GB (2TB) 4GB (4TB) (LPD DDR4)
Sequential Read Speed (up to)	1TB: 7,150 MB/s 2TB: 7,250 MB/s	1TB: 7,150 MB/s 2TB, 4TB: 7,250 MB/s	7,450 MB/s
Sequential Write Speed (up to)	6,450 MB/s	6,300 MB/s	6,900 MB/s
Random Read Speed (up to)	1TB: 700K IOPS 2TB: 850K IOPS	1TB: 850K IOPS 2TB: 1,000 IOPS 4TB: 1050 IPS	1TB: 1,200K IOPS (1TB) 2TB, 4TB: 1400K IOPS (2TB)
Random Write Speed (up to)	1TB: 1,100K IOPS 2TB: 1,200K IOPS	1TB, 2TB: 1,350 IOPS 4TB: 1,400 IOPS	1,550K IOPS
Management Software	Samsung Magician Software
Data Encryption	AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption TCG/Opal V2.0 Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667)
Endurance (Terabytes Written)	1TB: 400 TBW 2TB: 800 TBW	1TB: 600 TBW 2TB: 1200 TBW 4TB: 2400 TBW	1TB: 600 TB 2TB: 1200 TB 4TB: 2400 TB
Release Date	July 14, 2026	September 25, 2024	October 18, 2022
Warranty	3-year	5-year
US Launch Price	1TB: $269.99 2TB: $529.99	1TB: $109.99 2TB: 184.99 4TB: 344.99 (check current street pricing!)	1TB: $169.99 2TB: $289.99 4TB: $344.99 (check current street pricing!)

Samsung’s modest Gen 4 NVMe SSD

As shown in the table, the Samsung SSD 990 falls somewhere between the SSD 990 Evo Plus and SSD 990 Pro in estimated performance. What significantly sets it apart from the older models is its shortcoming: a shorter 400 TBW per 1 TB of storage space, compared to 600 TBW.

That doesn’t mean the new drive will run out of life immediately, as 400 TB is still a lot of data and can take years for a typical user to wear out in typical use — for comparison, the Micron Crucial P310 has even worse endurance, almost half. Still, when it comes to endurance, higher is always better, and Samsung only backs the Samsung SSD 990 with a 3-year warranty (instead of a 5-year warranty) for a reason.

On the bright side, the SSD 990, like its older cousins, features hardware encryption and comes with a good set of features, user-accessible via the common Samsung Magician dashboard software. You can use the application to monitor its health, benchmark it, manage overprovisioning, switch between three performance modes (Performance, Balanced, and Power Saving), and more. In short, users can do a lot with the drive.

At the end of the day, though, it’s always the real-world performance that counts, and the Samsung SSD 990 faired relatively well in my testing.

Samsung SSD 990: Mixed performance

I tested and put the 1TB version of the Samsung SSD 990 through its paces in real-world usage, using both the Balanced (default) and Performance modes, for over a week before posting this review. The drive didn’t wow anyone, but it proved to be as fast as one can expect from a PCIe Gen 4×4 drive in most cases.

In sequential (copy) performance, which is generally more tangible in terms of how quickly the drive can handle data, the Samsung SSD 990 showed mixed results.

Specifically, it excelled in write-only or read-only tests with 50GB or less data. However, in tests that require both reading and writing simultaneously — such as copying data from one folder to another on the same drive — it performed significantly worse than others.

The drive’s copy performance also degraded significantly when I copied large amounts of data at once. Generally, it was fast, at rates of thousands of megabytes per second, for the first 69GB of data. Beyond that, the speed dropped significantly to only a few tens of megabytes per second until the job was finished. This type of performance throttle reminded me of the 990 Evo and would only be an issue for those needing to move a very large amount of data (over 70GB) at a time.

In random-access performance, the Samsung SSD 990 showed more consistency, comparable to other PCIe Gen 4 drives. When used as the boot drive, it helped my testbed boot up fast and allowed most applications to launch almost instantly. In other words, while the drive wasn’t the fastest in synthetic tests, I had nothing to complain about in real-world usage.

What’s also noteworthy about the Samsung SSD 990 is the heat front. I noted that most of the drive remained cool to the touch, except for the connector side, which was warm but never alarmingly hot.

Conclusion

It seems the new Samsung SSD 990 is there to fulfill Samsung’s biannual SSD release schedule more than to be a “new” drive. As such, it doesn’t offer anything beyond what was available on previous drives and even falls short in certain respects. Still, it’s a solid option for anyone needing a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe drive. Consider it today!