SAMSUNG

990 PRO 2 TB: The most powerful SSD on the market

Samsung launched the 990 PRO drive for NVMe without much media attention. Although it is only an improved, previous PCIe 4.0 model, it has nevertheless become clearly the most powerful drive on the market. And all this with the price tag of the previous generation.

When Samsung introduced the 980 PRO model two years ago, it was the most powerful SSD for NVMe, but the victory had a very bitter taste. In the PRO series, we wanted MLC discs and not 3D TLC, unfortunately the manufacturer ignored our wishes and now only offers 3D TLC in the top series, which are significantly cheaper.

A lot has changed in the last two years, the Phison E controller came and showed Samsung that not only it is capable of producing high-end NVMe drives. All of Phison’s OEM built solutions are more powerful than the Samsung 980 PRO. In the end, the controller from Sandisk (uses WD) or the controller from Intel (Solidigm, SK Hynix) was more powerful. Since the introduction of the Samsung 980 PRO, dozens of more powerful drives have appeared on the market, but Samsung is still a safe bet and still sells well. In addition, the price has only dropped by a thousand crowns since the launch.

It might have seemed that Samsung was sleeping, or rather fell asleep, for the past two years. At first glance, he ignored the competition for two years and did not introduce any new PRO disc. Even though the Samsung 980 PRO is still a powerful drive, it is about a third behind the current leader in tests. That’s not enough.

A few weeks ago the Samsung 990 PRO was launched, the manufacturer didn’t even promote it much. I’m a little sad about the lack of support for the PCIe 5.0 interface, which was kind of expected after two years. This is how it looks like Samsung is saving the most modern interface for the model with ten in the name. Introducing a PCIe 4.0 drive makes sense, it’s a significantly cheaper solution.

A drive for PCIe 5.0 NVMe, which will offer twice the transfer speeds of PCIe 4.0, is not a cheap solution. First, it has to have a completely new and significantly more powerful controller with twice the number of channels, which will be expensive. The second option is to install multilayer NAND chips on existing channels, which will probably be even more expensive. In addition, the heating will be significantly higher than with PCIe 4.0 controllers. Manufacturing the first generation of PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives will be a challenge. So the Samsung 990 PRO is still a PCIe 4.0 drive.

The manufacturer is releasing only two models at the moment, which I understand in today’s era of steep decline in interest in PCs. The 1 TB and 2 TB capacity was a reasonable choice. 4 TB will be released later. Both announced discs have the same design and are sold with or without a heatsink. The price with the cooler is not yet known, they are not in stock anywhere. We will of course test the classic portion of the tests, the SLC cache and the disk temperature.

Author: Z. Obermaier