Samsung 990 Pro 2TB Review

The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end.

The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run.

Traces used:

Booting Windows 10.
Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable.
Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu.
Overwatch – starting the game until main menu.
Using Adobe After Effects.
Using Microsoft Excel.
Using Adobe Illustrator.
Using Adobe InDesign.
Using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use).
Using Adobe Photoshop (light use).
cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test).
cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test).
cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test).
cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test).
cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).

The best result from the 2TB Samsung 990 Pro in PCMark10’s Full System Drive Benchmark was the 1,072MB/s for the Heavy Use Adobe Photoshop trace. The file transfer tests also Produced a very good cp1 (write test) figure of 4,292MB/s backed up by the 4,175MB/s for the cp3 (read test) and 3,779MB/s for the cp2 read/write test traces.

The 990 Pro is the fastest consumer drive to date we've seen using the PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark. Its overall bandwidth figure of 560MB/s is some 127MB/s and 134MB/s faster than the standard and heatsink-equipped SSD 980 Pro respectively. It's also much quicker when it comes to access speed. At 46μs it's 14μs faster than both versions of the SSD 980 Pro.

Become a Patron!