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The 990 EVO Plus comes in a small blue box. Along with a picture of the drive, the packaging advertises a number of its key features including its 1TB 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 Plus 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 Plus 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.
Like the 990 EVO, the 990 EVO Plus utilizes 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 1TB version of the 990 EVO Plus, Samsung has used their own 8th-generation 236-layer TLC V-NAND flash chips. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there are two 500GB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB. There is also no DRAM cache chip as the 990 EVO Plus'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.
