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SAMSUNG 990 PRO WITH HEATSINK SSD 4TB £TBC/$TBC samsung.com
SPECIFICATIONS Interface: PCIe Gen 4.0 x4, NVMe 2.0 Form factor: M.2 (2280), 8.2mm Memory: Samsung V-NAND 3-bit TLC Cache memory: Samsung 4GB Low Power DDR4 SDRAM Encryption support: AES 256-bit encryption (Class 0), TCG/Opal, IEEE 1667 (Encrypted drive) Sequential read/write speed: Up to 7450/6900MB/s Random read/write speed: 1.4 and 1.55 million IOPS Software: Samsung Magician Capacities: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB If you must have the fastest internal SSD and are a dab hand at stripping down equipment to install a new drive, the Samsung 990 Pro has your name written all over it. The 990 Pro series has been out for a while, but this big boy is the brand-new 4TB model. That is twice the capacity of the current crop and provides a substantial amount of super-rapid flash storage. The 990 Pro is much faster than the previous 980 Pro series, and both have a heat sink to avoid overheating. It’s built for the needs of high-end video and 3D editing – and turns your computer into a blazing-fast gaming machine, too. Put it in a Playstation 5 for a massive boost, as its thin body is fully compatible. You can even create your own superfast external hard drive if you put it in a suitable housing like we did, with an inexpensive Orico enclosure which was less than £20/$20. What you then have is a rapid SSD that delivers more than double the data transfer rate of most PCIe 3.0 drives, but it is limited to the speed of the enclosure. You really need to spend around £100/$100 on a Thunderbolt 4 drive enclosure to unleash the full potential. In our test, the drive did get warm, which is why these expensive drives have more efficient control. Many external-style SSDs manage sequential read/write speeds of around 500-600MB/s, and standard NVMe
SSDs are up to 3500 and 3000MB/s. But the 990 Pro boasts read speeds of up to 7450MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 6900MB/s. And the random read and write speeds are up to 1.4 and 1.55 million IOPS, which is 14% quicker than the to 2TB 990 Pro. So this is bigger and faster – one of the quickest 4TB consumer drives on the market. The new PCIe 4.0 interface is up to twice as fast as PCIe 3.0 SSDs but is backwards compatible. One of the biggest benefits of the 990 Pro is its more power-efficient performance. Usually a faster drive consumes more power, although the 990 Pro uses less – with up to 50% improvement per Watt over the previous-generation 980 Pro. The 990 Pro is equipped with a nickel-coated controller and a heat-spreader label for improved heat management, too. Samsung’s Dynamic Thermal Guard technology ensures that the drive’s temperature remains in the optimal range, and we never had any overheating issues. The 990 Pro 4TB offers an additional layer of thermal control and there are RGB lights, too.
RED LIGHT The rapid new Samsung 990 Pro SSD lights up when in use and the colour can be changed
Not that you’ll see them if it’s used inside an enclosure or laptop. The drive’s slim profile of 8.2mm fits it into the slimmest spaces. But if you use the drive in a gaming machine where you can see the lights, then the free Samsung Magician software lets you change the LED colours, as well as more mundane tasks such as monitoring the performance and heat. Like all internal SSDs, the major issue is that this isn’t a plug-and-play solution like a pre-formatted external SSD. You have to ensure it fits with your computer or drive, as not all are compatible, then understand how to format it to make it work. That’s the price you pay for more speed. PRO MOVIEMAKER RATING: 8/10 A superfast drive – but needs some technical skill to install Pros: Fast, silent and compact Cons: Not plug and play
“The Samsung 990 Pro is one of the quickest 4TB consumer drives on the market”
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