Samsung 990 Pro Review: Speedy Stalwart

At a look

Knowledgeable’s Ranking

Execs

• High-notch efficiency
• {Hardware} encryption
• Heatsink an choice

Cons

• Not a discount
• No 4TB choice, but
• TBW surpassed by different drives

Our Verdict

A dramatic enchancment over the 980 Professional. The 990 Professional is a drive that may genuinely match one of the best that Seagate, WD and Kingston have to supply. Nevertheless, you pay for this privilege, and the biggest drive dimension is barely 2TB. These searching for a greater TBW and decrease price per GB would possibly take into account different choices.

Worth When Reviewed

From $169.99 for 1TB

Finest Costs In the present day: Samsung 990 Professional NVMe SSD

Not Obtainable

Samsung was one of many first SSD makers to supply a product for PCIe 4.0 NVMe with the wonderful 980 Professional. This was a design that stood head and shoulders above lots of the early various choices, and right this moment remains to be thought-about a stable alternative for avid gamers and workstations customers.

The snag with being early into any new know-how is that your rivals get to study out of your endeavours and use that information once they come to assemble their designs. Ultimately, the likes of Kingston, Sabrent and Seagate produced Gen 4 designs that went even faster than the Samsung 980 Professional with new controllers and higher NAND reminiscence.

Earlier than Gen 5 SSDs arrive, Samsung goals to stir the cauldron of Gen 4 know-how with the brand new 990 Professional.

Representing its try to regain the efficiency NVMe crown, is the 990 Professional well worth the premium worth over competitor designs or its earlier mannequin?

Design & construct

• Easy & smooth
• Heatsink not at all times included (however we’d advocate one)

Aside from that Samsung in all probability now wants a brand new naming conference, the one factor that the majority potential purchasers know concerning the 990 Professional is that it’s the newest in an extended chain of 900 collection SSDs that goes again to when all of the choices had been SATA and NVMe wasn’t an choice.

Mark Pickavance

The drive isn’t considerably totally different from nearly all of 2280 spec M.2 NVMe drives, having all the parts mounted on the upside of the board after which discretely hidden from view by labels.

Given the excessive throughput and its potential for warmth technology, the truth that the 990 Professional can come with no heatsink appears a mildly odd alternative. Our evaluate {hardware} was with out one, and we’d not need to run such a high-performance machine with out one hooked up.

Wanting on the heatsink-installed design, it’s a slim steel masking that ought to simply match on any PC, Sony PS5 or inside a laptop computer with PCIe 4.0 rated M.2 2280 slots.

Inserting it alongside a 980 Professional, the brand new 990 Professional has the same variety of parts and comparable flash modules however a smaller controller. Samsung doesn’t use a third-party controller however one created in-house. Whereas it was fabricated on the identical 8nm course of as was used earlier than, that it’s a smaller chip suggests a extra environment friendly and compact design.

These modifications are mirrored within the energy consumption of the brand new design, and we’ll speak extra about that later.

Specs & options

• {Hardware} encryption
• TurboWrite 2.0
• Spectacular power-efficiency

Attaining the total potential of this drive requires an NVMe 2.0 M.2(2280) slot that helps PCIe Gen 4 x4 operations, though it is going to work in a Gen 3 slot, however at decreased pace.

Samsung describes the controller as an ‘in-house’, which presumably is derived from the Elpis controller developed for the 980 Professional collection. Though, it didn’t hassle naming this one.

A essential function maintained from earlier than is that the 990 Professional helps {hardware} encryption, a function lots of the various manufacturers have determined is simply too area of interest to supply.

An space that usually will get ignored in SSD opinions is how the drive performs when confronted with a really massive write, like when a drive is cloned. New to the 990 Professional is TurboWrite 2.0 know-how, a change that might triple the buffer dimension of the earlier design.

On the 2TB drive, that gives as much as 226GB of buffered area earlier than the method is compelled to straight write to the NAND. Although, as with all caching know-how that makes use of SLC buffers, these numbers assume the drive is empty, because the potential buffer quantity will lower because the drive fills.

Mark Pickavance

One fascinating facet of the brand new design is that the brand new controller has unlocked energy efficiencies that the 980 Professional lacked. Samsung claims that the 990 Professional is 50% extra energy environment friendly, making it the higher alternative for laptop computer customers.

The ability consumption of the 990 Professional whereas writing is between 5.0 W and 5.1W relying on the drive’s capability, and the learn varies from 5.4W on the 1TB choice to five.8W on the 2TB mannequin.

For comparability, the 1TB 980 Professional used as much as 6.2W studying and 5.7W writing, although it did have a touch decrease 35mW idle draw. When matched with the calls for of the CPU and GPU in any system, these numbers are modest. Nevertheless, any enchancment is welcome for individuals who use battery energy, and fewer energy consumed interprets into decreased warmth generated.

Efficiency

• As much as 7,450MB/s learn pace & 6,900MB/s write
• Solely as much as 2TB whole capability
• Restricted TBW

Critically, the Samsung 980 Professional supplied solely ‘as much as’ 7,000MB/s learn and never above that threshold, one thing that we’ve seen subsequently from the WD Black SN850, Kingston KC3000, Adata XPG Gammix S70, Seagate FireCuda 530 and Corsair MP600 PRO XT.

The quoted pace of the 990 Professional is 7,450MB/s learn pace, making it theoretically not less than 6% faster than its predecessor, not less than in that context.

Write pace supposedly caps out at 6,900MB/s, and these speeds are constant throughout each the 1TB and 2TB fashions.

The place the variations diverge is within the quoted IOPS, with the 2TB drive having barely larger learn IOPs QD32 16 Thread take a look at than its 1TB counterpart. The bigger half consumes extra energy studying, as much as 5.8W from the 5.4W of the smaller capability, and it additionally has an ideal idle overhead of 55mW over 50mW on the 1TB choice.

Mark Pickavance

And, sometimes the bigger drive has a greater TBW (whole bytes written) score of 1200TB over the 600TB on the 1TB stick. These are unchanged from the 980 Professional, making the 990 Professional nothing particular in resilience when in comparison with that supplied by the Seagate FireCuda 530, being triple as a lot. And that no capacities over 2TB can be found can also be a little bit disappointing.

In our testing, it was attention-grabbing to check the 990 Professional with the earlier scores achieved by the 980 Professional and see the place the modifications have had the best affect on the brand new drive.

Utilizing ATTO for example, it seems that the 990 Professional is healthier with smaller recordsdata, studying and writing, the 980 Professional by about 15% till it reaches about 128K recordsdata and larger.

As welcome as the improved small file efficiency is, the killer distinction right here is the write pace. On our 980 Professional testing, this peaked at round 4,900MB/s, however on the 990 Professional hit the quoted 6,450MB/s. That’s practically a 32% enhance, and it makes the 990 Professional one of many quickest NVMe drives for writing that we’ve seen.

That enhanced write efficiency will likely be extremely noticeable for anybody modifying massive recordsdata, like 4K video, or dumping massive datasets onto this storage.

Utilizing the default profile of CrystalDiskMark 8.04, the 1TB evaluate drive managed a learn pace of seven,474MB/s and write pace of 6,861MB/s.

As an general impression of all of the benchmark knowledge, the Samsung 990 Professional stands out for the way constant it’s, as all operations are carried out with out massive fluctuations. This reveals that using cache is tightly managed to keep away from any noticeable efficiency oscillations and obtain most throughput.

In efficiency phrases, aside from its TBW, this Samsung 990 Professional is undoubtedly the cream that’s floated to the highest of extremely pasteurised retail SSD milk.

Worth

Contemplating its mantel because the quickest Gen 4 NVMe drive, the value of the 990 Professional isn’t excessive.

At Amazon within the UK on the time of writing, the price of the 1TB choice is £154.99, and the 2TB model is £282.38, making the bigger drive higher worth per GB.

The USA prices are virtually a direct greenback for UK pound translation, being $169.99 and $304.99 for the 1TB and 2TB fashions with no heatsink. Selecting a heatsink mannequin will increase the prices, after all.

To place that into some perspective, the earlier 980 Professional with no heatsink prices $119.99 and $219.99 for a similar capacities, and with a 500GB mannequin in that launch, it may be had for as little as $79.95.

Selecting the 990 Professional is a 50% enhance in price over its predecessor, making the 980 Professional appear like one thing of a discount at its present asking worth.

The blot on Samsung’s fiscal panorama right here is that the Kingston KC3000 is commonly cheaper than the 980 Professional, and but that drive is nearer to the efficiency of the 990 Professional.

Over the previous yr, the price of NAND has continued to fall, and it’s more likely to drop much more dramatically when the brand new 256-layer Flash chips seem and usher in 8TB and 16TB modules. And, with Gen 5 simply across the nook, this won’t be one of the best time to purchase an NVMe drive.

See our chart of the greatest SSDs to see what different choices you might have.

Samsung

Verdict

There isn’t any doubt that the 990 Professional is faster than the 980 Professional and the wealth of competing merchandise. Nevertheless, as these designs run into the bandwidth limitations of PCIe 4.0, they method full saturation of the connection to the PC, and there are few real positive factors to make. The 990 Professional might be the quickest Gen 4 drive, however the variations between this and different latest NVMe launches are refined.

Being quicker than different merchandise is essential to Samsung, probably buying and selling resilience to attain these uncooked speeds.

That brings us to the value, which appears affordable till you begin to take a look at what different manufacturers are asking for his or her Gen 4 merchandise. The Samsung 990 Professional makes even the Seagate FireCuda 530 look low cost. These merchandise additionally supply a 4TB capability that’s confusingly lacking from the 990 Professional vary.

Samsung says a 4TB choice will seem, presumably in 2023, however that it isn’t prepared at launch is disappointing.

We suspect that after the festive season, the 990 Professional would possibly see a worth discount to deliver it nearer to competitor merchandise, and if that occurs, the 980 Professional may turn out to be a good higher deal.

Due to this fact, the Samsung 990 Professional is made for those who need absolutely the quickest drive accessible and aren’t overly involved about the associated fee or the shortage of a bigger capability. It isn’t for these which are searching for one of the best worth or who count on added options like a heatsink to be included.

Specs

• Interface: NVMe 2.0 M.2(2280) PCIe Gen 4.0 x4
• Pace: 7450MB/s learn and 6900MB/s write
• Capacities: 1TB, 2TB
• TBW: 600TB (1TB), 1200TB (2TB)
• Dimensions: 80 x 22 x 2.3 mm
• Weight: 9 g
• Working temperature: 0-70C
• Guarantee/help: restricted 5-year guarantee inside the scope of the TBW