Samsung 990 Pro SSD Review

The Samsung 990 Pro M.2 Solid State Drive is out and brings even better performance than the excellent 980 Pro. However, a ton of PCIe 4.0 drives have been released over the last year. So with all the competition, has Samsung kept its edge?

Design

The Samsung 990 Pro comes in four variations as of writing. You can get 1 TB or 2 TB in storage with or without a heatsink. The standard version is a regular 2280 format M.2 drive and looks practically the same as its predecessor, the 980 Pro. The heatsink variant, on the other hand, has been upgraded to include RGB lighting.

One thing to note is that many gaming motherboards come with their own M.2 cooling solutions these days, and if that’s the case, you’ll want to get the standard version. Otherwise, you’ll likely have issues with installation. The heatsink can come in handy when building a small form-factor PC when cooling is at a premium. In most other cases, you can take it or leave it.

However, the heatsink is a requirement (according to Sony) if you install the Samsung 990 Pro in a PS5. Fortunately, that version is only $20 more, and it’s worth the extra money to have the peace of mind that you’re following Sony’s recommendations.

Performance

In our testing (which you can see below) the 990 Pro is a speed demon. It easily matched the advertised sequential read speed of 7,450 MB/s and write speed of 6,900 MB/s.

Crystal DiskMark 6.0 Tests

However, PCIe 4.0 SSD speeds are so fast that you will almost certainly hit a bottleneck elsewhere. The 990 Pro is among the fastest drives available, but it’s hard to quantify what that means in practice.

When it comes to gaming, you’re not going to find a noticeable difference in performance between the 990 Pro and its predecessor or its competition. Instead, the advantages this drive has come from things like power efficiency, build quality, thermal control, and the like.

Value

MSRP for the Samsung 990 Pro is:

• w/o heatsink:
  • 1 TB: $169.99
    
    2 TB: $289.99
• w/ heatsink:
  • 1 TB: $189.99
    
    2 TB: $309.99

Samsung’s SSDs have consistently been top performers, but the competition has caught up. Western Digital, Hynix, Sabrent, and Seagate all offer drives that are relatively neck-and-neck with the 990 Pro in performance. Despite this, Samsung drives still come with a slight premium compared to their competitors, which makes the choice a bit muddier this time around, especially since there are many more alternatives for a PS5-compatible drive than there were last year.