Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD review: The real EVO drive is here

The 990 EVO Plus is Samsung’s most significant consumer SSD release since the 990 EVO earlier this year, targeting some of the most popular drives on the market, including Samsung’s own 990 Pro. While the 990 EVO was something of a letdown, this improved version hits most of the right notes and reminds us that Samsung can still put out a good product. That's a good thing as it’s been over a year since the excellent 4TB 990 Pro arrived on the scene. Can Samsung claw itself back into the DRAM-less SSD market, with there being so many other good options out there?

Samsung was wise in its approach, as the 990 EVO Plus launches with a 4TB model. That gives it a leg up over many QLC flash drives like the 4TB Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite — in terms of performance — while offering a higher capacity than excellent E27T-based drives such as the Corsair MP600 Elite, at least for now. It’s also a single-sided solution, unlike the 4TB Crucial T500, with a tight design that’s massively more power-efficient than the earlier 990 EVO. Throw in Samsung’s Magician software and support for hardware encryption, and you have a real contender.

The potential concern remains that the 990 EVO Plus is a day late and a dollar short, as its late arrival and relatively high MSRP leave something to be desired. On the other hand, it’s a good all-around drive that would be a great pickup for any system you have. If you’re a Samsung fan, rejoice! If not, well, you can celebrate the fact that there’s one more excellent drive on the market to help maintain downward pressure on storage prices.

Samsung 990 EVO Plus Specifications

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus keeps the 1TB and 2TB SKUs of the 990 EVO but, importantly, adds a 4TB option to the table. This option is also single-sided, unlike the 4TB Crucial T500, which could make it more attractive for some laptop owners. At the time of review, the drive currently costs $89.99, $149.99, and $344.99, respectively, for each capacity.

That 1TB lands about $15 too high when considering competition like the Lexar NM790 and Teamgroup MP44, not to mention the Klevv CRAS C925. You can even get DRAM with the Adata Legend 960, Corsair MP600 Pro NH, Nextorage NEM-PAB (which has a heatsink as well), or Inland Performance Plus, or Adata Legend 960 Max (another heatsink option), all at a lower price point. The 2TB model also costs about $20 too much, but we don’t expect these prices to hold. 4TB is more of a sticking point as many of the budget drives at that capacity use QLC rather than TLC flash, which comes with some caveats. Nevertheless, it’s possible to get DRAM and TLC flash (and optionally a heatsink, though that costs extra) for under $300 at 4TB, like with the Crucial T500 4TB. Or there's the DRAM-less but with a heatsink Maxio MAP1602-based Lexar Play 2280 4TB for $294. However you slice it, the 990 EVO Plus pricing is high at every available capacity.

Moving on to the raw specs, the drive is capable of hitting up to 7,250 / 6,300 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,050K / 1,400K random read and write IOPS. Performance looks good at all three capacities. The drive can operate at x4 PCIe 4.0 or x2 PCIe 5.0, the latter of which makes it interesting for some future laptop x2 5.0 M.2 slots and also allows it to be used in laptop x4 5.0 slots unlike the current high-end 5.0 drives on the market. There are other edge cases where this can be useful, such as with add-in RAID cards where each downstream M.2 slot might only supply two lanes of bandwidth. In that case, the 990 EVO Plus will not leave performance on the table, but it’s admittedly a niche scenario.

The 990 EVO Plus supports the TCG Opal 2.0 specification for hardware encryption, which is a must-have for some users. Samsung backs the drive with a five-year warranty at up to 600TB of writes per TB capacity. Nothing unexpected there. 

Samsung 990 EVO Plus Software and Accessories

Samsung’s SSD toolbox, called Samsung Magician, is the gold standard in the consumer SSD industry. This application provides information on system and drive health, allows for benchmarking of the drive, and controls all drive features along with having the ability to update drive firmware. It also assists with data migration when adding or upgrading a drive. Magician is a selling point for some users, but is largely optional and only works on Windows and macOS.

Samsung 990 EVO Plus: A Closer Look 

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The 2TB 990 EVO Plus is not only single-sided, it also only uses a single NAND flash package. This makes sense as the OEM version of the drive, the PM9C1b, needs to work in the M.2 2230 and 2242 form factors in addition to 2280. It’s possible to fit up to sixteen dies in a package, which means 1TB for 512Gb dies and 2TB for 1Tb dies. The 4TB version of this drive will therefore be using up the free package pad with two NAND flash packages in total.

The drive is rated for 1.9A at 3.3V, or over 6W, and the highest power state via SMART is pegged at 6W exactly. In practice, the drive pulls less than this and is marketed as being more power efficient than the 990 EVO as well. It should work great for any laptop or portable system that takes M.2 2280 SSDs.

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Here we see Samsung’s Piccolo controller that we covered in some detail in our 990 EVO review. As stated then, the possibility of using newer and faster flash to max out the PCIe 4.0 interface was always there. Samsung has chosen to do that here. We also previously mentioned the possibility of the controller, or at least the so-called PiccoloQ variant, being used with QLC flash, or even with V7 TLC flash. This is the case with the BM9C1 and PM9C1a OEM versions of the hardware. There’s not too much to add other than the fact this remains a relatively robust design for a DRAM-less controller, which did hurt its power efficiency in our previous review. With the new flash it should fare much better.

Instead of using the V6P TLC flash of the 990 EVO, the 990 EVO Plus is using Samsung’s 236-Layer V8 TLC flash. We first saw this flash on the 4TB 990 Pro and it is now also used on the smaller-capacity models of the drive. This flash is faster and more efficient than V6P, with a higher I/O rate to help the controller max out the PCIe 4.0 interface with a four-channel controller.

There’s not too much to add here from our prior analysis, aside from stating that the 990 EVO Plus should have been the drive Samsung released from the get go, given the competition in the market and the 990 EVO’s own relatively late arrival. Our thoughts at the time were that Samsung was trying to save money with a stopgap solution and the 990 EVO Plus proves that to be true. 

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