Samsung markets the new flagship as a gaming powerhouse, and the company claims it will also excel in other areas, like 4K video editing, where fast write speeds are essential. The manufacturer claims that the 990 Pro can achieve maximum read speeds of 7,540 MB/s and maximum write rates of 6,900 MB/s.
This new NVMe SSD from Samsung features the company’s latest vertical NAND (V-NAND) that improves speed without adding unnecessary bulk by increasing per-chip density. A new proprietary controller has been integrated into the SSD.
To demonstrate how much faster loading times are with the 990 Pro, Samsung put it through its paces in Forspoken. A SATA SSD would take four seconds to load the map, while a regular hard drive would take 28 seconds. The Samsung 990 Pro loaded the map in just one second.
As the greatest solid-state drives (SSDs) have a tendency to overheat, Samsung has improved the driver’s power efficiency by up to 50 percent in comparison to the previous flagship 980 Pro, which should help mitigate the driver’s tendency to overheat. The SSD was also outfitted with a number of technologies designed to keep it cool.
In addition, it made a variant of the drive called, somewhat unimaginatively, “990 Pro with Heatsink.” It accomplishes what it claims to do, and it does it with a dash of RGB lighting to boot, making the interior of your case look that much more luxurious.
While Samsung has announced a new solid-state drive (SSD) that appears to be quite fast, the company is sticking with the tried-and-true PCIe Gen 4.0 technology rather than experimenting with PCIe 5.0. Presently, Samsung provides the maximum speed possible via PCIe 4.0, having wrung every last drop of performance from the interface.
Although PCIe 5.0 is twice as fast as PCIe 4.0, few solid-state drives (SSDs) support it since they require an Intel Alder Lake processor. When compared to the initial PCIe 5.0 SSDs, the Samsung 990 Pro’s read and write speeds pale in comparison to the possible 13,000 and 12,000 MB/s. Since AMD Ryzen 7000 will soon be released and support PCIe 5.0, we should expect to see more of these SSDs in the market.
The Samsung 990 Pro, with storage capacities of up to 2TB, will be available for purchase throughout the month of October. The 1TB variant has an MSRP of $179, while the 2TB version will cost $309. The company has also hinted at a 4TB variant, which is expected to debut in 2023 at a price that has yet to be announced.