In a quest to enhance everyday computing experiences like gaming, productivity, and video/photo editing, Samsung on Tuesday launched the new SSD 990 EVO solid-state drive. The heir to the nearly four-year-old SSD 970 EVO Plus, the SSD 990 EVO provides a performance boost of up to 43% and a 70% improvement in power efficiency over that model, according to the Korean tech giant.
How? Mainly by keeping things as cool as possible. The 990 EVO’s heat spreader, a sort of label affixed to the surface of the drive, effectively regulates the thermal condition, Samsung says. The SSD 990 EVO is also a DRAM-less SSD: By using host memory buffer (HMB) technology, the drive employs the host computer’s DRAM for caching. That helps Samsung keep costs down and achieve reasonable performance with a DRAM-free controller (in this case, of homegrown Samsung design).
(Credit: Samsung)The SSD 990 EVO offers sequential read speeds of up to 5,000MBps, and write speeds up to 4,200MBps. These are typical speeds for a mid-level PCI Express 4.0 SSD. The company also points out several times in its promotional materials that the SSD 990 EVO can be used with both PCI Express 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 interfaces—the latter, in theory, promises much faster speeds. (The drive’s label even cites “PCIe 4.0 x4 / 5.0 x2 NVMe M.2 SSD.”) This seems a peculiar thing to highlight, however, because for M.2 NVMe SSDs, PCI Express is fully forward- and backward-compatible between versions, and the SSD 990 EVO isn't rated for anything close to the 10,000MBps-plus speeds that current-gen PCIe 5.0-native drives are capable of. The 5.0 x2 on the label indicates that the SSD 990 EVO can only use two (of four) PCIe 5.0 lanes on a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot, which explains why its throughput speeds are (at most) half those of many of the swifter PCI Express 5.0 SSDs (which would be considered PCIe 5.0 x4) we have encountered. So don't expect greater speeds if you're intending to use the SSD 990 EVO in a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot on your motherboard; the lane count is a limiter.
Durability, as measured in terabytes written (TBW), is rated at 600TBW for the 1TB model and 1,200TBW for 2TB, typical values for those capacities.
The drive also supports Modern Standby, which ensures the device can quickly resume from sleep. Even if your PC is in low-power mode, you can instantly wake up your device with uninterrupted internet connectivity and seamless notification reception.
Samsung warranties the SSD 990 EVO for five years, and includes its Samsung Magician suite of SSD optimization tools, which allows you to streamline the data migration process for SSD upgrades. In addition, Samsung Magician protects data, monitors drive health, and provides firmware updates. The SSD 990 EVO also supports AES 256-bit full-disk hardware encryption, and meets the TCG/Opal V2.0 security standard for self-encrypted devices.
The 990 EVO will list at $124.99 for the 1TB model and $209.99 for the 2TB model. Check back soon for PCMag's full review.