Model: Samsung 990 PRO 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: Samsung Electronics
Provided By: Samsung America
Samsung Electronics has been a leader in the electronics industry for more than 30 years. Since the introduction of their first television in 1970, this Korean company has grown to become one of the world's leading electronics manufacturers, offering everything from tiny semiconductors to large home appliances. Samsung is no stranger to the storage industry either. Along with an assortment of DVD and Blu-ray Disc drives, the company offers both hard drive and flash based storage solutions for the portable and desktop computer markets.
Samsung recently launched its latest consumer NVMe SSD, the 990 PRO. Optimized for graphically demanding games and other intensive tasks including 3D rendering, 4K video editing, and data analysis, this compact, M.2 form factor SSD is powered by Samsung's new, in-house "Pascal" controller and is available with up to 4TB of their latest 7th generation V-NAND flash. The 990 PRO is also available with or without an RGB-enabled heatsink and is equipped with an ultra-fast PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 2.0 interface to deliver up to 7,400 MB/s read and 6,800 MB/s write speeds. To top it all off, the drive is optimized for Microsoft’s DirectStorage API software technology, which allows games to load much faster by leveraging the full speed of NVMe SSDs.
The 990 PRO is available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB (coming in 2023) capacities. For this review, Samsung sent us the heatsink-less 2TB version of the drive, which is capable of delivering up to 7,450 MB/s sequential read and 6,900 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 1,400K random read and 1,550K random write IOPS.
Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the 990 PRO has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Samsung's new NVMe SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the 990 PRO have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we've come to expect from Samsung? Keep reading as we find out.
