The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 7900x CPU, Gigabyte B650E AORUS Master motherboard, 32GB (16GB x 2) of Corsair Vengeance 5200MT/s DDR5 memory, Samsung 990 Pro 2TB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 11.
To test the performance of Samsung's 990 EVO SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark. For comparison, I've also included test results from the Silicon Power PX10, Crucial T500, ADATA SE920, ADATA LEGEND 970, Crucial T700, Solidigm P44 Pro, Samsung 990 PRO, ADATA LEGEND 960, Crucial P3 Plus, SK hynix Platinum P41, Silicon Power XS70, WD_BLACK SN770, ADATA XPG ATOM 50, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade, Crucial P5 Plus, Plextor M10PY, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, WD_BLACK SN850, Silicon Power US70, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite, Crucial X10 Pro, Crucial X9 Pro, ADATA Elite SE880, Kingston XS2000, ADATA XPG ATOM 30, Samsung 980, Silicon-Power UD70, Crucial P2, SK hynix Gold P31 and Crucial P5.
As I mentioned earlier, the 990 EVO uses Samsung's "Piccolo" (S4LY022) controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential and random read and write speeds. For this test, we're using the peak and real world profiles.
According to Samsung, the 2TB 990 EVO is capable of reading at 5,000 MB/s and writing at 4,200 MB/s. While the drive had no problems reaching its rated read speed, it came up short in CrystalDiskMark's sequential write speed test.
As you'd expect, the 990 EVO wasn't as fast when tested with the "real world" profile which uses a single thread and a much lower queue depth. Nevertheless, it was still able to read and write at more than 3,700 MB/s.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the 990 EVO's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 512B to 64 MB and the total length set to 256MB.
 Samsung 990 EVO 2TB |
 Crucial P3 Plus 2TB |
When tested with ATTO, the 990 EVO's read speeds topped out at about 4.74 GB/s and its write speeds at 3.54 GB/s.
