Samsung has introduced a new NVMe solid-state drive, the 990 Evo Plus. The manufacturer claims that the new product is 50% more productive than its predecessor, the Samsung 990 Evo.
Image source: Samsung
Samsung 990 Evo previously visited our test laboratory. The peculiarity of the drive is that it can operate in both PCIe 4.0 x4 and PCIe 5.0 x2 modes. There is no difference in throughput or performance, but Samsung believes that this feature will be useful in the future to save PCIe lanes in ultraportable computers.
The new 990 Evo Plus model has the same connectivity feature – it has two PCIe 5.0 lanes and four PCIe 4.0 lanes. The drive uses a proprietary Samsung controller based on a 5nm process technology and 8th generation V-NAND flash memory chips. The 990 Evo Plus will be available in 1, 2 and 4 TB capacities. The predecessor is offered only in volumes of 1 and 2 TB.
For the 1 TB version of the Samsung 990 Evo Plus, sequential read and write speeds of up to 7150 and 6300 MB/s are claimed. For 2 and 4 TB options, these characteristics are up to 7250 and 6300 MB/s, respectively. The predecessor in 1 and 2 TB versions provided 5000 and 4200 MB/s, respectively.
The performance of random read and write operations for the 1 TB 990 Evo Plus model is stated at 850 thousand and 1.35 million IOPS, for the 2 TB model – 1 million and 1.35 million IOPS, and for the 4 TB model – 1 .05 and 1.4 million IOPS, respectively. For predecessors with 1 and 2 TB, these figures were 680–700 thousand and 800 thousand IOPS, respectively. Samsung also claims that the new 990 Evo Plus is up to 73% more energy efficient than the previous model.
The recording resource remains the same: 600 TBW (terabytes of overwritten information) for the 1 TB version and 1200 TBW for the 2 TB model. For the 4 TB version it is 2400 TBW. All three versions of the 990 Evo Plus NVMe drive come with Samsung Magician Software monitoring software and support 256-bit AES encryption.
The Samsung 990 Evo Plus will go on sale this fall. The 1 TB SSD costs $110, the 2 TB version costs $185, and the 4 TB model costs $345.