Samsung has introduced the latest iteration of its flagship SSD family, the 990 Pro SSD. While it’s still based on the PCIe 4.0 interface, this new SSD promises even faster speeds, with a noticeable increase in random reads and writes. Like its predecessors, the Samsung 990 Pro SSD comes in a standard variant and one with an integrated heatsink so it can run faster for longer during more demanding workloads.
While we’ve seen demos of PCIe 5.0 SSDs, those products aren’t quite ready to hit the consumer market yet. For now, we’re sticking with PCIe 4.0, but the Samsung 990 SSD Pro still comes with a nice performance uplift across the board. For sequential read speeds, you can expect speeds up to 7,450MB/s, a relatively small increase from the 7,000MB/s offered by the 980 Pro, but write speeds have increased very significantly – they now go up to 6,900MB/s compared to the maximum 5,100MB/s in the previous model. That’s an increase of over 35%, so you can definitely feel it if you work with large files.
Samsung 990 Pro SSD (no heatsink)
Even more noticeable, however, is the performance for random read and write operations. The Samsung 990 Pro SSD has random read speeds up to 1,400K IOPS, while write speeds go up to 1,550K IOPS. That’s a 40% increase for read speeds, and a 55% increase for write speeds compared to last year’s models. That difference in performance should be especially important in gaming and creative workloads, and it should result in faster load times across the board.
Samsung also touts much better efficiency with the 990 Pro SSD compared to the 980 Pro. Specifically, Samsung claims up to 1,380MB read or 1,319MB written per watt, as opposed to 1,129MB and 877MB, respectively, for its predecessor. For writes, that’s around a 50% improvement in efficiency, which is a pretty big deal. Samsung says this is thanks to a new controller built on a low-power architecture.
Those are quite a few improvements for a product that’s still based on the same interface, and it’s looking like it might be one of the best SSDs out there. If you’re hoping to buy the Samsung 990 Pro SSD, it’ll be available in October, starting at $179 for 1TB, or $309.99 for 2TB, though that will likely be a bit more for the heatsink models. A 4TB version will also be coming in 2023.
Source: Samsung
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