Samsung 990 Pro 2TB Review

The successor to Samsung's first Gen4 drive, the very popular SSD 980 Pro has now arrived. The 990 Pro brings with it a new controller and Samsung's 7th generation 176-layer 3-bit MLC V-NAND.

Details about the new Pascal controller are very thin on the ground but it is built on an 8nm Process. It uses low-power architecture which Samsung claim improves the SSD’s power efficiency by up to 50% compared to the 980 Pro. It also makes use of hardware automation technology and cache algorithms to optimise the data path from the NAND for improved performance.

At launch the 990 Pro comes in just two capacities; 1TB and 2TB and two versions, with a ‘plain' drive and a low profile heatsink-equipped option. The standard drive, as reviewed here, has a copper heat spreader built into the label while the heatsink version gives more thermal control. A flagship 4TB non-heatsink version is due to be launched sometime in 2023.

With the 990 Pro Samsung has pulled off the neat trick of producing a drive that is not only faster than its predecessor, it also uses less power to do it. The company claim an over 50% improvement in MB/Watt for the 990 Pro over the 980 Pro; 877MB/Watt versus 1,319MB/Watt.

The drive features Samsung's Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 technology to improve write performance. The default TurboWrite region of the 2TB drive is 10GB but if more is needed up to 216GB can be used as a dynamic SLC to increase the total SLC buffer to 226GB.

Samsung rate the Sequential performance of both models of the drive as up to 7,450MB/s for reads and up to 6,900MB/s for writes. When we tested the drive with the ATTO benchmark, the best we saw from the drive was 6,720MB/s for reads and 6,220MB/s for writes. However, with the CrystalDiskMark benchmark and our own Sequential test, we could confirm the official figures. With CrystalDiskMark we saw a read score of 7,477MB/s and a write score of 6,885MB/s. With our own test, we got very much the same results; 7,485MB/s for reads and 6,884MB/s for writes.

When it came to 4K random performance, we couldn't get anywhere close to the official figures. Samsung quote QD32 (16 threads) figures for the drive of 1,550,000 IOPS and 1,400,000 IOPS for read and writes respectively. With our standard 4-threaded tests the best we saw from the drive was 356,356 IOPS IOPS for reads and 263,972 IOPS for writes.

The 2TB 990 Pro is priced at £283.99. It is not currently listed for sale but it should soon be available directly from Samsung HERE.

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Pros

• Overall performance.
• 5-year warranty.
• AES 256-bit encryption.
• Magician software.

Cons

• Tested 4K performance couldn’t match the official maximum figures.

KitGuru says: Samsung's 990 Pro takes over the mantle of flagship drive from the popular 980 Pro and performs the neat trick of being faster while being more power efficient.

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