Samsung 990 Pro 2TB

Return of the king? Yes, Jeremy Laird is back.

- Jeremy Laird

SPECS

Size: 2TB

Type: M.2 2280

Controller: Samsung Pascal

Mem: Samsung seventh-gen TLC VNAND

PCIe: v4.0 x4

Spec: 7450MB/s read, 6,900MB/s write

IOPS: 1.2M read, 1.55M write

DRAM cache: 2GB DDR4

SLC cache: 226GB dynamic

Endurance: 1,200TB

Warranty: Five years

With AMD recently joining the PCI Express 5.0 party with its Ryzen 7000 CPUs, you might expect Samsung to roll out its first Gen 5 M.2 drives to suit. But no. The new Samsung 990 Pro remains a Gen 4 SSD.

If you think about the current situation, a revised Gen 4 drive does at least make sense. While you may now be able to buy PCIe Gen 5 capable PCs from both Intel and AMD, the number of such systems out there in the wild is tiny.

On paper, the new 990 Pro certainly looks like it has closed the gap to the newer and quicker drives that have blown past the Samsung 980 Pro since its launch two long years ago. At the heart of it all is a new in-house Samsung controller known as Pascal. Manufactured on Samsung’s 8nm process node, it offers lower consumption and reduced latency. Samsung reckons the new controller is up to 50 percent more power-efficient, thanks to both a new nickel coating for the chip package and revised thermal control software.