While the industry eagerly awaits Samsung’s release of retail SSDs with a PCIe Gen5 interface (akin to the PM9E1 for PC makers), the company decided to refresh its lineup of PCIe Gen4 drives with the 990 Evo Plus family. The new lineup promises performance close to the legendary 990 Pro at a lower price.
The 990 Evo Plus family will come in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB configurations and will feature sequential read/write performance of up to 7,250/6,300 MB/s and random read/write speeds of up to 1,050K/1,400K IOPS. From a performance point of view, the new SSDs are considerably faster than the original 990 Evo offerings (and offer a 4TB model that is absent from the 990 Evo lineup). However, they are still slower than the company’s flagship 990 Pro drives. Nonetheless, we can still say that we are dealing with some of the best PCIe Gen4 SSDs around.
| Product | 990 Evo Plus 1TB | 990 Evo Plus 2TB | 990 Evo Plus 4TB | 990 Evo 1TB | 990 Evo 2TB | 990 Pro 2TB/4TB |
| Form Factor | M.2 2280 (Single-Sided) | M.2 2280 (Single-Sided) | M.2 2280 (Single-Sided) | M.2 2280 (Single-Sided) | M.2 2280 (Single-Sided) | M.2 2280 (Single-Sided) |
| Interface / Protocol | PCIe 4.0 x4 or 5.0 x2 / NVMe 2.0 | PCIe 4.0 x4 or 5.0 x2 / NVMe 2.0 | PCIe 4.0 x4 or 5.0 x2 / NVMe 2.0 | PCIe 4.0 x4 or 5.0 x2 / NVMe 2.0 | PCIe 4.0 x4 or 5.0 x2 / NVMe 2.0 | PCIe 4.0 x4 / NVMe 2.0 |
| Controller | ? | ? | ? | Samsung Piccolo | Samsung Piccolo | Samsung Pascal |
| DRAM | N/A (HMB) | N/A (HMB) | N/A (HMB) | N/A (HMB) | N/A (HMB) | LPDDR4 |
| Flash Memory | 236-layers 8th Gen V-NAND | 236-layers 8th Gen V-NAND | 236-layers 8th Gen V-NAND | 133-Layer TLC (V6P) | 133-Layer TLC (V6P) | 176-layer TLC |
| Sequential Read | 7,150 MB/s | 7,250MB/s | 7,250MB/s | 5,000 MB/s | 5,000 MB/s | 7,450 MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 6,300 MB/s | 6,300 MB/s | 6,300 MB/s | 4,200 MB/s | 4,200 MB/s | 6,900 MB/s |
| Random Read | 850K | 1,000K | 1,050K | 680K | 700K | 1,400K |
| Random Write | 1,350K | 1,350K | 1,400K | 800K | 800K | 1,550K |
| Security | TCG Opal 2.0 | TCG Opal 2.0 | TCG Opal 2.0 | TCG Opal 2.0 | TCG Opal 2.0 | TCG Opal 2.0 |
| Endurance (TBW) | 600TB | 1,200TB | 2,400TB | 600TB | 1,200TB | 1,200TB/2,400TB |
| Warranty | 5-Year | 5-Year | 5-Year | 5-Year | 5-Year | 5-Year |
“The 990 Evo Plus is built for laptop and desktop PC users seeking faster processing speeds and expanded storage capacity,” said Hangu Sohn, Vice President of Memory Brand Product Biz Team at Samsung Electronics
Samsung’s 990 Evo Plus SSDs use the company’s 8th Generation V-NAND (3D TLC NAND) and a DRAM-less controller made using a 5nm-class process technology (we assume this is SF5 aka 5LPP production node, though this is speculation at this point) that is covered with a nickel heatspreader. The controller is NVMe 2.0 compliant and connects to the host using a PCIe 4.0 x4 or PCIe 5.0 x2 interface. So, from one point of view, this is a PCIe Gen5 controller, but it only delivers performance in a PCIe Gen4 ballpark.
As far as security capabilities are concerned, the drive supports AES 256-bit full drive encryption and TCG/Opal 2.0 capabilities.
Samsung’s 990 Evo Plus drives have a five-year limited warranty or total bytes written (600 TB to 2400 TB, depending on the exact SKU).
The 990 Evo Plus will be offered to consumers globally with a recommended retail price of $109.99 for the 1TB version, $184.99 for the 2TB version, and $344.99 for the 4TB version. The good news is that the new 990 Evo Plus SSDs are already available at prices below the recommended retail price at some retailers. For example, a 1TB 990 Evo Plus SSD can be acquired for $79.99 at Walmart.
