• 2 min read
Samsung 990 SSD stumbles on price and long writes
Samsung’s new 990 beats the 990 EVO in everyday use, but trails the 990 EVO Plus and collapses to 50MBps–350MBps after cache runs out.
Image: PCWorld
Samsung is shipping a new PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD at a time when fresh consumer SSD launches have become rare, and the result is mixed. According to PCWorld, the new Samsung 990 is faster and more power efficient than the 990 EVO it replaces, but it is slower than the older 990 EVO Plus, and its pricing is hard to justify.
PCWorld says the 990 uses Samsung’s in-house SALY028 controller in a 2280 form factor, with support for NVMe 2.0 over PCIe 4.0 x4. Samsung did not clearly identify the NAND type, but reviewer Jon L. Jacobi argues it behaves like QLC, citing both its warranty profile and the steep drop in sustained write speeds once secondary cache is exhausted.
The drive uses a host memory buffer, borrowing around 64MB of system RAM for primary caching, while secondary cache accounts for roughly 20 percent of total capacity. Samsung offers a three-year warranty and rates the drive at 400TBW per 1TB, below the 600TBW per TB rating on the TLC-based 990 EVO and 990 EVO Plus.
Recommended reading
TSMC sees 4x more 2nm chip orders than 3nm at launch
Pricing is a bigger problem. Samsung’s pre-launch prices were listed at $270 for 1TB and $530 for 2TB. PCWorld notes that this puts the 990 alongside the much faster 990 Pro and even the newer 9100 Pro, while the 990 EVO Plus was spotted for $20 less at 1TB and well over $100 less at 2TB.
On performance, the 990 hit the promised 7.1GBps read speed in testing, but not Samsung’s claimed 6.4GBps sustained writes. PCWorld recorded about 5.4GBps write speed with cache available.
The real weakness showed up in PCWorld’s 450GB write test. Once the 990 ran out of secondary cache, writes dropped to somewhere between 50MBps and 350MBps, usually around 200MBps.
That contrasts sharply with the 990 EVO and 990 EVO Plus, which PCWorld says hold close to 1.2GBps after cache depletion, though they hit that point sooner. On the 2TB models tested, the 990 EVO ran out of cache at around 100GB, the 990 EVO Plus at around 225GB, and the 990 only after well over 350GB.
PCWorld’s bottom line is straightforward: if you can still find the 990 EVO Plus, buy that instead. If not, the Samsung 990 is still fine for most real-world users, who are unlikely to hit its worst-case write behavior often.
Computing Editor
Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.
via PCWorld
