Samsung Announces New 990 PRO SSD, No PCIe Gen5 Support
Today, Samsung announced their upcoming and previously leaked 990 Pro SSD. The 980 Pro blew the market away with its insanely fast Gen 4.0 speeds when it first launched. The Korean giant gave us some insight regarding the expected performance.
No PCIe 5.0 Support
In a very unexpected manner, Samsung’s 990 Pro does not support the PCIe 5.0. This is a bit disappointing because AMD’s PCIe 5.0 supported AM5 motherboards are just around the corner. PCIe 5.0 is a massive improvement up from the previous gen PCIe 4.0, providing up tp 128GB/s transfer rate in a x16 lane.
Speed Metrics
Equipped with Samsung’s V-NAND and a new proprietary controller, the 990 Pro will utilize the full power of PCIe Gen 4.0. The read/write speeds are rated at 7,450 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 6,900 MB/s, respectively. Samsung rates this as a 55% improvement over the last 980 Pro in random performance.
Those looking for instant game load times, the 990 Pro was tested in Forspoken, an upcoming title from Luminous Productions. The new 990 Pro flexing its muscles loaded the map in 1 second as compared to 4 seconds for a typical SATA SSD. The HDD (Hard Disk Drive) based system falls behind massively at 28 seconds.
A Gaming Centric Theme
Moving on to the actual design of the SSD, Samsung opted for a ‘gaming’ look. Expect much faster load times due to the additional RGB featuers. This is a bit odd because Samsung SSD always featured the fancy and simple yet stunning black theme.
The red theme is a bit interesting because the most Samsung ever did in terms of a ‘gamery’ look was during their PS5 targeted 980 Pro lineup. All in all, this does (not the RGB, but the heatsink) result in improved thermals.
Samsung’s newly designed controller dramatically improves the SSD’s power efficiency by up to 50% compared to the 980 PRO.
Release Date
These SSDs will arrive in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB flavours priced at $179 (1TB) and $309 (2TB) respectively. The 1TB and 2TB variants are set to arrive in October whereas the 4TB version is planned for next year. What’s better? This MSRP is actually lower than the 980 Pro’s initial MSRP showing that NVMe is indeed getting cheaper and more accessible to the average consumer.
| Category | Samsung SSD 990 PRO | 990 PRO with Heatsink | ||
| Interface | PCIe Gen 4.0 x4, NVMe 2.0 | ||
| Form Factor | M.2 (2280) | ||
| Storage Memory | Samsung V-NAND 3-bit TLC | ||
| Controller | Samsung in-house controller | ||
| Capacity5 | 1TB | 2TB | 4TB |
| DRAM | 1GB LPDDR4 | 2GB LPDDR4 | 4GB LPDDR4 |
| Sequential Read/Write Speed | Up to 7,450 MB/s, Up to 6,900 MB/s | ||
| Random Read/Write Speed (QD32) | Up to 1,400K IOPS, Up to 1,550K IOPS | ||
| Management Software | Samsung Magician Software | ||
| Data Encryption | AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0, Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667) | ||
| Total Bytes Written | 600TB | 1200TB | 2400TB |
| Warranty6 | Five-year Limited Warranty7 | ||
