Samsung 990 Pro SSD review: Mighty fast, but not a bargain

Price When Reviewed

$240 for 2TB

The Samsung 990 Pro is among the greatest NVMe SSDs available on the market. But the place as soon as Samsung’s SSDs have been forward of the efficiency curve, this one is merely stage with it—inserting fourth general in our testing.

It’s a really tight race for the highest spot, however the 990 isn’t the winner, and Samsung nonetheless costs the 990 Pro as if it have been a dominant performer. That at the moment makes it a little bit of a tough promote.

Note: This evaluate is a part of our ongoing roundup of the best SSDs. Go there to be taught extra about competing merchandise, what to search for in an SSD, and shopping for suggestions.

Samsung 990 Pro: Design and options

The 990 Pro is your customary 2280 type issue (22mm large, 80mm lengthy) M.2, NVMe SSD. It’s PCIe 4 x4 using 176-layer TLC NAND, with 1GB of major caching DRAM for each 1TB of NAND. The controller is an in-house Samsung design that, in keeping with the corporate, affords a 50 p.c enchancment in energy effectivity over the 980 Pro.

The 990 Pro is accessible both with a heatsink or with out (examined). The label on the non-heatsink model additionally serves as a warmth spreader, so until you’re pounding on the drive continuously by transcoding high-resolution video or gaming, you in all probability don’t want the heatsink. Also, many efficiency motherboards present their very own heatsinks.

Retail pricing is $170 for the 1TB capability, and $290 for the 2TB model sans heatsink. Add $20 if you’d like mentioned heatsink. Those costs are considerably larger than what the top-ranked WD SN850X was accessible for on Amazon on the time of this writing.

We can solely examine utilizing the costs that the corporate offers till the drive really reveals up in retail. However, the older 980 Pro is simply as closely discounted because the SN850X, so in the event you see the 990 Pro for extra aggressive costs, that might make the drive a much more enticing buy.

Samsung offers a five-year guarantee which is mitigated by a 600TBW (terabytes that may be written) per 1TB endurance ranking—i.e., the guarantee expires when both restrict is exceeded. TBW scores are extraordinarily conservative as a rule, so you’ll doubtless have the ability to write extra to the drive.

600TBW per 1TB is definitely fairly a slightly low allowance given the 990 Pro’s premium pricing.

Performance

In some checks, the 990 Pro rocked; in others it fell a bit off the tempo of the opposite prime opponents; and in a single take a look at (the lengthy 450GB write), it was surprisingly mid-tier in efficiency. Add all of it up and it was the fourth quickest drive we’ve examined, although not lagging by a lot. It’s an especially tight contest between the perfect drives.

CrystalDiskMark 8 (proven under) was largely one of many 990 Pro’s sturdy factors. It was quickest in two of the checks, and a hair behind in a 3rd; nonetheless, a surprisingly weak single-queue learn efficiency sabotaged its mixture rating. Note that the WD SN850X included within the comparability is the quickest drive general we’ve examined thus far.

If not for that weak single-queue/thread efficiency, the 990 Pro’s mixture CrystalDiskMark 8 efficiency would possibly’ve positioned it solely a tick out of first place. Note that this mixture is our totaling of the outcomes, not one thing CDM8 offers.

When it got here to the true world, the 990 Pro was a bit behind the opposite prime drives in small file/folder writes, however aced the only large-file write. The 21-seconds learn velocity is the quickest we’ve seen, matched solely by the in any other case slower Teamgroup Cardea A440 Pro.

What did shock us a bit was the 990’s uneven switch fee whereas writing a 450GB file to its cells. With an empty 2TB SSD with loads of NAND to be used as SLC secondary cache, that is often very easy and even. The outcome was the 990 Pro lagging a few half minute off the tempo set by the quickest performers on this take a look at.

The quite a few dips and bumps in velocity you possibly can see under have been doubtless due to granular real-time allocation of extra NAND for secondary cache duties. The greatest 450GB write time we’ve seen on our new take a look at mattress was 206 seconds by the 4TB Crucial P3. Having that a lot NAND helped the P3’s trigger. It lagged in different areas.

The efficiency variations we’re mentioning listed here are minor. You may take any of the highest PCIe 4 drives and by no means discover the distinction subjectively. In different phrases, they’re all very, very quick.

Internal drive checks at the moment make the most of Windows 11 64-bit operating on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combo with 4 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an ASMedia ASM3242 USB 3.2×2 card. Copy checks make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk utilizing 58GB of the 64GB whole reminiscence.

Each take a look at is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Over time, as a drive fills up, efficiency will lower attributable to much less NAND for caching and different components.

The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we have been shipped and of the capability examined. SSD efficiency can fluctuate by capability attributable to extra or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND accessible for secondary caching. Vendors additionally often swap parts, although Samsung has historically modified mannequin numbers for revisions.

Should you purchase Samsung’s 990 Pro?

While Samsung’s 990 Pro didn’t set any data, it’s nonetheless one among a handful of drives vying for the highest efficiency spot. It’s a wonderful drive; nonetheless, a lot of its competitors is considerably extra reasonably priced, making it more durable to advocate.