Samsung unveiled its new flagship SSD (solid state drive) lineup, the 990 PRO Series, which is said to be built for a wide range of applications such as gaming and 4K video editing.
There is a lot of hype about the 990 because there were hints that this new SSD would work on the PCIe 5.0 interface. Unfortunately, people will have to wait longer for a consumer-grade PCIe 5.0 SSD from Samsung as 990 PRO Series (opens in new tab) still runs on the old PCIe 4.0 interface, just like the 980. To provide a simplified explanation (opens in new tab), PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) is an expansion bus used to transfer data from an SSD to graphics or video cards. PCIe 4.0 can transfer data at an average speed of 16GT/s (giga transfers per second) while the 5.0 interface does it at 32 GT/s.
This is not to say that PCIe 4.0 is slow by any means; not as fast as 5.0.
Fast speeds
Either way, the 990 PRO Series is still impressively fast. Samsung claims the 990 offers a “55 percent improvement in random performance over it [old] 980 PRO.” According to the company, the 990 has read and write speeds of up to 7,540 MB (megabytes per second) and 6,900 MB/s, respectively. Read speed refers to how quickly the 990 can access stored files. The fastest speeds fast means faster startup times for apps. And write speed refers to how fast files are saved from the SSD. This is especially useful for editors who need to save or copy large 4K video files. Without these speeds fast, the process can be extremely slow.
Samsung claims that it was able to push the performance of PCIe 4.0 thanks to a combination of the company V-NAND memory technology (opens in new tab) and a new proprietary controller inside the 990.
If that wasn’t enough, the new devices are powered by NVMe (opens in new tab) (Express non-volatile memory) protocol for even faster load times. Samsung gives the example of testing the SSD 990 with the upcoming game the prophesied and found that the map loading time was about one second. When tested on disk drives, the load time increased significantly to about 30 seconds.
Dealing with heat
With so much going on, an SSD like this can get pretty hot, so Samsung designed the 990 to be 50 percent more power efficient compared to the 980 PRO. The SSD also features the company’s Dynamic Thermal Guard technology to ensure an optimal temperature and a heat-dissipating label to keep things cool.
Samsung is also offering the 990 PRO model with Heatsink for those who want additional temperature control. No details are known on how the Heatsink design actually improves heat dissipation. The company simply says it “offers an extra layer of thermal control.” But The Heatsink model comes with RGB LEDs on the back (opens in new tab) for that little extra pizzazz.
The base 990 and Heatsink models will be released this October and will come in two different storage capacities. The 1TB model will cost $179 while the 2TB model is priced at $309. There are plans for a third 4TB model, but that won’t arrive until 2023. A price hasn’t been revealed for the third SSD.
The announcement seems to imply that the price points are the same for both the base and Heatsink models. We reached out to Samsung for clarification on this, as the wording was a bit confusing. This story will be updated if we hear back.
We also asked if and when the company will launch a 990 PRO Series model with the PCIe 5.0 interface. Corsair recently teased its new PCIe 5.0 SSD, which is slated to offer a massive read speed of 10,000MB/s. Hopefully Samsung will reveal a PCIe 5.0 model soon.
If you are interested in learning more about these drives, TechRadar recently updated its best SSD list for 2022.