Samsung 990 PRO NVMe SSD Review - Versus 22 Other Drives

today Samsung is launching their brand new m.2 nvme SSD the 990 Pro now this is the successor of the 980 Pro and according to Samsung it is supposed to offer a huge performance increase over the older model and it is supposed to become the ultimate the Gen 4 SSD that you can buy now Samsung does have a long history of making excellent ssds but their latest model was overtaken by several other competitors that came out later and this new 990 Pro is supposed to once again put Samsung to the top of the chart so let's check out that performance and let's see if all these big claims are actually true let's go this video is brought to you by seasonic and their Prime TX power supplies these fully modular high quality power supplies are extremely efficient they are very quiet due to their new hybrid fan control that stops the fans completely under 40 load they offer a variety of connections for any kind of systems you have in mind and you even get the new 12 volt high power connection you need for the brand new RTX 490 graphics cards from Nvidia they range from 650 Watts all the way up to 1600 Watts for the biggest enthusiasts out there and as a nice bonus you get a cozy 12 year long warranty check them out using the links in the description below the 990 Pro will launch with two capacities available one terabyte and two terabytes but a four terabyte version will be coming out next year there will not be a 500 gigabyte option which is actually fine because ssds have become quite cheap and anything that is under one terabyte has a pretty poor price to capacity ratio and there should be models with and without a heatsink available right here I have a non-heat synced two terabyte model and design wise it is not really that different from the previous versions it still has the same black label on both sides that act as a small heat spreader and as you can see all of the components are on one side if you plan to go for this one I strongly suggest you put it under some kind of a heatsink because it does get pretty hot but I'll talk about thermals a bit later if you go for a 990 Pro with a heatsink on the other hand keep in mind that the heatsink is pre-installed and officially it is not removable because there is a chance of damaging the drive if you try to remove it which would then also avoid your warranty so if you plan on using a heatsink from your motherboard for example you need to make sure to get the SSD without a heatsink right away looking at the specs it has everything that we expect a high-end Drive should have so it's a gen 4x4 nvme SSD it has dram cache it uses SLC caching there's a five year long warranty and Samsung continues to have extensive support for Hardware encryption which is a nice bonus in terms of technical specs they're always a bit vague because they're actually one of the few manufacturers that make all the parts themselves so the controller and the memory are Samsung designed and built but let's look at that performance as always I'll start with the PC Mark 10 quick Benchmark and for those of you that don't know it yet this is a collection of tests that replicate all the little things we do with our PCS every single day so those are the things like working with documents opening photos and even loading games and this is also a very useful Benchmark for anyone that is looking for a secondary drive or an extra SSD for their systems for those simple little tasks and looking at the scores Samsung was quite right about the performance increase it left every other SSD I've tested behind by a huge margin including the WD sn850 and the Kingston KC 3000 and it is so far ahead of the 980 Pro it feels like a completely different class of a product but let's take a look at the more intense full PC Mark 10 Suite test that replicates a more serious and more constant use of your system and this is a great Benchmark for anyone that is looking for a new main drive or perhaps to run some applications that are actually very heavy on the SSD the 980 Pro takes a first spot here as well with everything else comfortably behind it the sn850x isn't too far off studying about nine percent behind it which is still an impressive performance but compared to the 980 Pro the 990 Pro is about 50 faster which again is in line with what Samsung claimed if we look at latency that does have a big impact in almost every relevant Benchmark the 990 Pro does extremely well it was easily beating the sn770 which has a big latency benefit due to its host memory buffer feature on a very very fast test bench now the consistency test isn't that relevant for a lot of you because it simulates an extreme multi-hour workload that most users don't really do but for a high-end Drive especially it is good to see how it holds up when really stressed and the result here is just of a completely different level it holds up way better than anything else in this chart by a huge margin and more than doubles the performance of previously decent drives like their own 980 Pro the fact that it was maintaining nearly a 1 000 megabyte per second average over several hours of intense testing is just extremely impressive in my opinion again this doesn't really affect most of you but for anyone that has some Niche use that causes those extreme SSD workloads this is actually amazing news the 3dmark storage test includes a lot of Gaming related tasks and here we look at things like loading games like installing games a recording gameplay and moving your games around and it is a very nicely balanced test to look at for people that are going to use this drive mainly for gaming the Samsung 990 Pro does quite well here it landed on the fourth place and once again it showed a pretty big performance improvement over the 980 Pro but in these gaming workloads specifically the sn850x is actually the faster drive and if I look at this graph where I weigh game loading times and installation times only it is a similar story so if you're interested in this a Western Digital Drive I will be posting a full review of it tomorrow so make sure you click that subscribe button so you don't miss it sequential read and write performance really doesn't represent real life views as well as previous tests but it's still good to see if it meets the claims in sequential rights the 990 Pro isn't at the top but the entire top part is basically bottlenecked by the Gen 4 slot so between these drives it doesn't really matter they're all the same still it does show an improvement over the 980 Pro in sequential reads it is a similar story all the top drives including the 990 Pro are limited by the Gen 4 connection but again a small improvement over the 980 is still present so it is definitely a very fast drive but let's see how hot does it get now Samsung's own specs say that a drive should ideally operate between 0 and 70 degrees but without a heatsink or a fan this SSD can definitely get much hotter than that when stressed looking at the flare camera I saw an outside temperature of around 86 degrees but at that point it did start throttling and the internal sensors already reported 99 degrees a heatsink is an absolute must for this driver just as it has been with every other fast Gen4 ssdf tested so far so if you have a motherboard with a heatsink it will be just fine and if not just grab the heatsink version from Samsung and if that one is not available in your region just grab a third party heatsink a decent third-party heatsink from Amazon will only cost you about ten dollars or euros and if you're interested I will leave a few suggestions in the description of this video another strong feature of Samsung is their magician software and it is one of the few SSD software packages that actually feels like a proper modern application it lets you check on the drive's health it lets you sort features like data migration and setting up Hardware encryption but it all also regularly prompts you to install firmware updates and Samsung constantly offers updates that do increase performance and stability over time now pricing is always complicated when it comes to ssds and then especially so with Samsung drives they always launch at these crazy high recommended retail prices and then they get cheaper over time for example the two terabyte 980 pro model originally launched at 450 euros here in the Netherlands two years ago but now it only costs about half of that now this two terabyte 990 Pro is launching at 330 Euros here in the EU which is cheaper than what 980 launched at but still you can find very good ssds for 100 euros less and in the US the 990 Pro will launch at 310 dollars but with a 980 Pro and the sn850x being 220 and 230 dollars it is again really hard to recommend paying that much more just to get the 990 Pro so if I just looked at launch prices I would have to say that this drive is crazy expensive and it's not really worth getting it but I also know that in a couple of weeks or months this situation will be completely different so please keep that in mind and take this initial price with a huge grain of salt based on the numbers we've seen today it is clear that the Improvement Samsung made are really impressive and for Creative workstations or other high-end applications that really rely on storage these drives are the way to go but the more typical users will probably want to wait a bit longer for prices to stabilize before getting one of these because this always always happens with Samsung and in my opinion it will be worth the wait or at least until Gen 5 ssds become a thing but that's a story for another day anyways that is all I have for today thank you all for watching this video if you liked it please do consider subscribing to this channel so you never miss my uploads bye guys and see in the next one [Music]

Channel: Techtesters

Views: 200,765

Keywords: samsung 990 pro review, samsung 990 pro ssd, samsung 990 pro, 990 pro review, 990 pro ssd, samsung 990 ssd, samsung 990 pro ssd 2tb, best ssd 2022, best ssd for pc, best ssd for ps5, fastest ssd for pc, fastest ssd for ps5, best ssd for content creation, best ssd for creators, best workstation ssd, 990 pro ssd review, samsung ssd, samsung ssd 990 pro, 990 pro vs 980 pro, 990 pro vs sn850, 990 pro vs sn850x, 990 pro vs, vs 990 pro, ssd, nvme, 990 pro nvme, best m2 ssd

Id: yoD-zx46VgU

Length: 11min 14sec (674 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 18 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/kabirhi]

I'm surprised it's not PCIe 5.0.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/TerriersAreAdorable]

At or near the top of all the charts, expensive for now but likely to see its price drop over time like previous Samsung SSDs.

[u/ForgotToLogIn]

Tom's Hardware review

[u/Psyclist80]

Waiting for the 5.0 drives to drop! New micron NAND and Phison controller, hopefully not too far off. Sitting on a SATA Samsung 850 Pro until then!

[u/TwireonEnix]

Do these really make a noticeable difference outside of benchmarks? in me just chilling in my pc playing games games and such?

[u/Tystros]

when new QLC 8 TB SSDs from Samsung? The current gen is really old by now.

[u/JonF1]

It looks okay... but it doesn't seem like it will beet the SK Hynix P41 by enough to justify the likely high premium.

We are still basically at the latency wall of NAND and caching, new controllers and nvme gens can only really do so much to mitigate it. Optane still remains by far the undesputed king of the most "responsive" drives, even with its EOL status.

[u/lokol4890]

The main reason I want this is because apparently they're releasing a 4tb version