There has always been a rather distinct division in the SSD world. As much as there had to be a value driven SSD to move the typical SSD users over, there also became that demand for the top performing SSDs, and so there should be. Flash media performance has changed our world exponentially. Whether we realize it or not, every person in our modern world depends on flash in some form or another. Consider this.
If you want to comment on this article (or any other social venue) what you write travels world wide instantly and gets posted…thousands and even tens of thousands of miles…because of the speed of flash media in data centers. Instant banking. Travel reservations. Online everything. We take it for granted…and the industry has taken for granted the need of the common person at the most basic level of computing. Typically, SSDs have been rather expensive for one to achieve performance, capacity and value. Today we introduce the Samsung 990 EVO Plus.
On our bench today we have both the one and two terabyte versions of the newest Samsung 990 EVO Plus. This SSD is a bit of an odd duck as it works with PCIe 5.0 systems in a two-lane capacity and PCIe 4.0 systems in a 4-lanes capacity. Although our test bench today tests in Gen 4, we have tested in Gen 5 and the performance is identical. This SSD is available in 1,2 and 4TB, is a M.22 2280 (22mm wide x 80mm long) form factor and follows the NVM Express 2.0 protocol.
Samsung states that the 990 EVO Plus has increased speeds by at least 45% over the previous gen and the 2TB SSD that we are testing today will achieve 7250MB/s read and 6300MB/s write with up to 1.4 million IOPS. Specifications for the 1TB version list read speeds a bit lower at 7150MB/s. This SSD has AES 256-bit full encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0 and Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667) compliance and is also supports TRIM, garbage collection (GC) and SMART.
The Samsung 990 EVO Plus is a single-sided SSD with only two chips on its face, the SSD controller and NAND chip. This is a DRAMless SSD that utilizes memory from the PC in place of an onboard DRAM chip via the Host Memory Buffer.
The controller is the well established 5nm Samsung Piccolo (S4LY022) DRAMless SSD controller and, as can be seen in the photo, it is nickel plated to provide for better heat dissipation. The NAND chip is a 2TB Samsung 236-layer 8th generation 3D TLC V-NAND chip.
The Samsung 990 EVO Plus will be available this morning, comes with a 5-year limited warranty, and has MSRP list pricing set at $109.99 (1TB), $184.99 (2TB) and $344.99(4TB). A fully detailed specification sheet can be found here. Check Amazon for pricing and availability.