Samsung Launches 990 Pro Series PCIe 4.0 SSDs With up to 7,450 MB/s

Samsung has launched its eagerly anticipated 990 Pro Series SSDs. These are high-performance NVMe M.2 2280 SSDs that are “optimized for gaming and creative applications.” In the run-up to this announcement, there were hints that Samsung’s 990 Pro Series SSDs would feature a PCIe 5.0 interface; however, that hasn’t come to pass, at least not yet. The new Samsung 990 Pro Series SSDs use a PCIe 4.0 interface.

If you are perhaps a little disappointed that the 990 Pro Series SSDs don’t use PCIe 5.0, there's at least some consolation. Firstly, these drives are a step above their predecessors, with the 990 Pro SSDs capable of sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s, respectively. This compares well against the Samsung SSD 980 Pro, which could muster a maximum 7,000 MB/s and 5,100 MB/s, respectively. Moreover, the IOPS performance numbers are as much as 55% better than the 980 Pro SSDs. 

In broader comparisons, when gaming in Forspoken, Samsung claims the new SSDs load a game level in approximately one second, four times faster than a SATA SSD, and 28x faster than level loading from an HDD.

The second consolation is that the 990 Pro Series launches with three capacities of 1, 2, and 4TB, in two variants. One variant will use a nickel coating on the controller and a heat spreader label that spans across the Samsung V-NAND 3-bit TLC ICs. Samsung will also sell a 990 Pro HS (with Heatsink) model, which comes with a beefier sculpted heatsink with RGB LED lit "go-faster stripes."

Samsung doesn’t make specific data-based claims about the advantages of buying the RGB heatsink model. All it says is that the heatsink “prevents performance degradation due to overheating.” Whichever model you buy, Samsung says the new controller is designed to improve power efficiency dramatically, claiming a 50% improvement over the controller used in the SSD 980 Pro.

There had been some hints that Samsung’s SSD 990 Pro would be a PCIe 5.0 device. It isn’t, and this is all the more surprising given that within recent days, lesser storage players like Corsair and Gigabyte have unveiled PCIe 5.0 SSDs with transfer speeds of up to 12,400 MB/s. This might be due to Samsung wishing to use its own proprietary SSD controllers, but the only PCIe 5.0 storage controller currently shipping is from Phison.

Retailers will start selling the 1 and 2TB models from October, priced at MSRPs of $179 and $309, respectively. Unfortunately, we don’t have a price for the 4TB models, which aren’t due until 2023. Also, Samsung didn’t reveal the price premium for the RGB Heatsink models.