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

Comparison Products

As the 990 EVO Plus is a late arrival, it’s up against some high-performing drives including some that are still in their prime. Standing in for PCIe 5.0 SSD performance we have the Crucial T705 and Adata Legend 970 Pro at the high-end and the Phison E31T ES as the future of “budget” drives. Popular DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 drives include the Silicon Power US75 and the Klevv CRAS C925, both with the Maxio MAP1602 controller and TLC flash — a very popular hardware combination on a number of other drives the 990 EVO Plus directly competes against — and the QLC-based Crucial P310. It also wouldn’t be a contest without showing the original 990 EVO, which is feeling more dated by the day. The DRAM-equipped Crucial T500 cannot be ignored, either, as ostensibly it’s a budget drive with only a four-channel controller — certainly it currently costs less than the 990 EVO Plus.

Rounding things out, we have the three fastest and most popular older PCIe 4.0 SSDs with the WD Black SN850X, the SK hynix Platinum P41, and Samsung 990 Pro. These three drives are all higher-end than the 990 EVO Plus on paper, but that extra performance may not be worth it if you have a tight budget or want a cooler-running, power-efficient solution.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed. 

Image 1 of 3

While the gains over the 990 EVO aren’t earth-shattering, the 990 EVO Plus does bring improvements that put it closer to DRAM-equipped drives and essentially near the top for PCIe 4.0 SSDs as a whole. It would be difficult to get more out of this interface, so we can understand why Samsung didn’t want to immediately compete with its own 990 Pro through a lower-end part. Samsung has updated the 990 Pro with newer flash, starting with the launch of the 4TB SKU, and it’s a powerful drive, but for games the 990 EVO Plus should be more than enough. Launching it with a 4TB option out of the gate was a good move.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

Image 1 of 3

The 990 EVO Plus gets perilously close to the 990 Pro in PCMark 10 as well. Really, this is all the performance you need out of an SSD today. It could be worth moving to a PCIe 5.0 SSD like the T705 — or at the hopefully less-expensive end, a drive built on the Phison E31T, with reviews notably incoming — if you want more bandwidth. For most users, though, and certainly laptop users, the 990 EVO Plus would be an excellent choice for all-around computer work.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

Image 1 of 3

The 990 EVO Plus would make a good PS5 drive, too. It’s got the performance, it’s efficient, and it even comes in the 4TB flavor. Sometimes drives can act a little wonky in this test, but Samsung’s firmware seems to be on point with this release. Our main criticism here would be that you can get away with a less expensive drive for PS5 gaming, but for the Samsung fans out here, this should be a superior alternative to the 990 Pro once prices stabilize. The 990 EVO would still work, but it’s limited to 2TB and has significantly lower bandwidth.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives. 

Image 1 of 3

The 990 EVO Plus reads and writes just fine, but that is to be expected with the performance level of this controller and the updated flash. The drive should be able to reach near the limits of the PCIe 4.0 interface. Copy performance was less than anticipated, but this might be an anomaly.

Samsung specifically designed the 990 EVO Plus with a larger cache — basically extending the size of the Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 feature, which is a hybrid pSLC cache — so it could better tackle transfers. In practice this will write more data in the same time within a certain range, but for our 50GB test the main difference between the 990 EVO Plus and 990 EVO is the faster flash.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads. 

Image 1 of 14

Nothing really stands out in ATTO, although the read performance curve is a little more bumpy than desired. Going from 16KiB to 32KiB results in the first bump, not unexpected as modern consumer flash still uses 16KiB pages. The next bump at around 1MiB is where the 990 EVO Plus can fully interleave — four four-plane dies for each of the four controller channels, with a 16KiB page per plane — but most people are still concerned with smaller I/O. The 990 EVO Plus does not excite with sequential performance in CDM either, with or without substantial queue depth, but it provides sufficient bandwidth for a drive of its class.

Getting to that smaller I/O, though, the 990 EVO Plus has middling 4KB QD1 random read and write latencies. Samsung’s earlier V7 TLC flash — used on the 2TB 990 Pro, which was reviewed before the V8 change — has long been known as having excellent 4K random read performance. V8 is theoretically slower but has more bandwidth available, and the higher I/O rate is needed to push the PCIe 4.0 interface with a four-channel controller such as the 990 EVO and EVO Plus have. In practice, the 990 EVO Plus will provide a subjective experience more or less on par with other drives on these charts, so it’s best not to focus too much on any single performance result.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes or more (we did two hours with this 8TB drive) to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

Image 1 of 3

We briefly mentioned how Samsung changed the TurboWrite 2.0 feature on the 990 EVO Plus above, extending the size of the pSLC cache significantly for the 2TB SKU in comparison to the 990 EVO. The 4TB model, not being tested today, has an even wider cache that’s supposed to be twice the size of the 2TB model we’re reviewing and four times as large as the 1TB and 2TB 990 EVO. To put this into perspective, the intelligent cache sizes at play are 108GB, 216GB, and 432GB, although exactly how this works requires a bit of explanation.

TurboWrite is essentially a hybrid cache, which means it has a small static portion that’s always available along with a massive dynamic portion that can “intelligently” be resized based on how full the drive is. This ensures that the drive always has some cache available and, if like most people you are only using one-half of the drive capacity or less, the cache is large enough to handle just about anything. There’s a limit to the cache size depending on the flash used — 3-bit TLC flash can at most have one-third of its capacity as pSLC, as pSLC is a single-bit mode using the same cells — and having too large a cache can reduce a drive’s sustained performance and performance consistency.

The 2TB 990 EVO Plus writes at almost 6.1 GB/s for over 37 seconds in our testing, which suggests a cache somewhat larger than the stipulated 216GB. This makes sense because what Samsung stipulates is just the dynamic or “Intelligent” part of the cache, with 10GB of static cache also available for a total of 226GB. This is more or less exactly what we find. This happens to be the same amount that the 990 Pro uses — and the 990 Pro and EVO Plus have the same 442GB cache at 4TB — so there are no surprises here. After the cache is depleted, the TLC write speeds are around 1.5 GB/s, but the drive’s ability to recover cache here and there means a steady state of almost 1.8 GB/s.

This is a good result and is what Samsung generally provides, by which we mean that Samsung doesn’t want a situation like the T500 where performance can fall off a cliff or become inconsistent. The careful sizing of the hybrid pSLC cache on the 990 EVO Plus means it’s fairly consistent with writes. One could say it’s no faster long term than the 990 EVO, but the EVO Plus has a much larger cache. In the real world, this would typically provide a better experience as you have more runway before hitting the slower write state. This also enables the drive to recover to a semi-fast state pretty quickly when idle, so you don’t get those slower-than-a-HDD QLC flash blues. 

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.

Image 1 of 4

The 990 EVO Plus is quite efficient and, more importantly, much more efficient than the 990 EVO. This is due to the use of more efficient flash as well as a faster bus with more bandwidth, which in turn allows workloads to be completed more quickly. The T500 matches it while having DRAM, but the 990 EVO Plus has a single-sided design that runs pretty cool.

Samsung claimed an improvement of up to 73% in power efficiency and we’re seeing above 58%, which isn’t bad. Samsung also claims a decrease in power consumption of 16% while we’re seeing over 9%, but our testing isn’t the same as Samsung’s. We’d like to add that the 4TB 990 EVO Plus will require more energy, in-line with the original 2TB 990 EVO, but will still be much more efficient.

In our testing, the 990 EVO Plus reached a maximum recorded temperature of 65°C. This is about 16°C below the first listed throttling threshold. In practice, this drive should not require a heatsink and will work well in a range of devices. For hotter machines or prolonged workloads, a heatsink or cooling solution is still recommended.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Samsung 990 EVO Plus Bottom Line 

The simplest thing we could say is that the Samsung 990 EVO Plus is exactly what the 990 EVO should have been. It’s competitive in terms of performance and power efficiency and has no glaring weaknesses. It’s single-sided, is offered at up to 4TB, and has the upgraded pSLC cache of the 990 Pro without having the usual large-cache drawbacks. If we had to point out any weaknesses, it’s that the drive arrives a little late and the current pricing is a little high — though at least it's lower than Samsung's 990 Pro on the 2TB model. We can safely recommend it for use in any sort of system whether laptop, desktop, or console, although there are less expensive options out there in most cases.

The two odd things about the 990 EVO Plus are that, one, it still has the EVO’s x2 PCIe 5.0 mode and two, it scores pretty close to the 990 Pro in some tests. The former isn’t much of an issue — although we noted some quirks getting the 990 EVO to run properly back when we tested it — but also not much of a bonus. Theoretically, that capability could be more useful in the future or in niche cases. For the latter oddity, we start to see why Samsung came out with the 990 EVO first: It’s best to avoid having your top DRAM-less drive compete with your more expensive flagship model. Samsung was wise to bring out the 4TB 990 Pro first — a drive which is still single-sided, unlike the WD Black SN850X or Crucial T500 — before releasing the 990 EVO Plus, which also has a 4TB SKU. We’re still disappointed it took so long to get here, though.

It’s hard to deny that one reason it played out this way is that the NAND flash market — and by proxy, the consumer SSD market — has been tumultuous to say the least. There’s reason to believe that Samsung’s 990 EVO was a reaction to this state of affairs as it uses older but refined flash without needing anything wild with the controller. This makes sense when looking at the bigger picture, especially since the 990 Pro — and the lingering 980 Pro, for that matter –- has been a good seller despite its own problems. However, the 990 EVO Plus’s late arrival on the scene does put it in a tight spot as there's a decent amount of competition that’s already priced pretty close to the floor. This also leaves the 990 EVO in limbo, but since Samsung seems to have pushed that model for economic reasons it will still find a place in many markets that don’t know better (i.e. pre-built OEM systems).

We mentioned some of the competing drives earlier in the review, but to reiterate, the Teamgroup MP44 is a good example. It’s a solid, affordable drive at all of the 990 EVO Plus’s available capacities. At 2TB things open up more, which will especially be the case once more E27T-based drives like the Sabrent Rocket 4 and Corsair MP600 Elite come to the market. The same goes for 1TB, although over time this is becoming a less popular capacity in favor of 2TB. Crucial has the T500 at all three capacities, too, and its use of DRAM puts it a cut above the 990 EVO Plus if that’s a factor for you. If we had to add commentary here, it’s that Samsung is probably lucky that WD doesn’t have a faster SN770 on the market yet, since that would make this a tighter contest.

There are two other categories of drives to look at, with the 990 EVO Plus sitting in the middle. The first is older, high-end drives like the Black SN850X, 990 Pro, and E18-based affairs like the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G. These have more potential horsepower with twice the controller channels and plenty of DRAM. For high-end systems and for sustained workloads these still make sense. The second category is slower, entry-level drives, like the Teamgroup MP44L, which provide sufficient performance at an affordable price. If budget is your number one priority — and this is often the case with newer PC builders as well as those who want to upgrade an older system or drive — then these remain the best option in many cases.

That leaves the 990 EVO Plus surrounded on all sides, but the overall package is quite good and this drive will likely be popular despite the competition, thanks to the Samsung name that still carries some weight. We do think the price needs to come down, despite Samsung’s name, but this is a drive you should be able to reliably buy and throw into any machine without too much worry. Samsung has solid software support and, for those that need it, hardware encryption, which covers some extra bases. Most people probably don’t want or need more from an SSD than a consistent experience, and the 990 EVO Plus fills that everyday role without ever being offensive.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

MORE: All SSD Content