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The 990 EVO comes in a small blue box. Along with a picture of the drive, the packaging advertises a number of its key features including its 2TB capacity, PCIE 4.0 x4 / 5.0 x2 NVMe interface, maximum read speed and 5 year warranty. Inside, you'll find the SSD as well as a small installation guide and warranty statement.
Physical Features:
The 990 EVO uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 80 x 22 x 2.3 mm and tips the scales at a mere 9.0g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to x4 lanes of bandwidth. In the case of the 990 EVO though, it only uses four lanes when inserted into a PCIe 4.0 slot. When plugged into a PCIe 5.0 slot, the number of lanes used drops to two.
The 990 EVO is one of first drives to utilize Samsung's "Piccolo" (S4LY022) controller. Manufactured using a 5nm process, this DRAM-less, PCIe 4.0 x4 / 5.0 x2 NVMe 2.0 controller is equipped with a multi-core ARM Cortex R7 processor and has 4 NAND channels with 4 chip enables (CE) per channel.
For the 2TB version of the 990 EVO, Samsung has used their own 6th-generation 133-layer TLC V-NAND flash chips. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there are two 1TB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB. There is also no DRAM cache chip as the 990 EVO's controller takes full advantage of NVMe's Host Memory Buffer feature by using a small portion of the computer's memory to cache the mapping tables.
