Samsung 990 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD

Samsung's 990 Pro takes over the mantle of flagship drive from the popular 980 Pro and performs the neat trick of being faster while being more power efficient.

If you are in the market for a new storage drive for your computer, or just want to expand your Playstation 5 storage, the Samsung 990 Pro is the ultimate evolution of the form, limited only by the limitations of the PCI Express 4.0 bandwidth and wins our OC3D Performance Award.

Samsung's 2TB 990 PRO is without question the best-performing flash-based consumer SSD in the world; nothing else is even close.

The Samsung 990 Pro NVMe SSD is a top-tier performer. That, and the company’s sterling reputation would make it an attractive option—if there weren’t equally competent drives available for quite a bit less.

Samsung's SSD 990 Pro is a zippy PCI Express 4.0 internal drive that's a step up from its predecessor, offering excellent performance for creative tasks, if not necessarily for gaming.

PCIe 4.0 has been with us for a while now, but that means Samsung has had both time and experience on their side to make this one of the fastest and most efficient PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 SSDs we’ve ever seen, it’s a clear improvement in all respects over the also fantastic Samsung 980 Pro. Class-leading performance is always going to get a big thumbs up from us, so it’s easy to say we highly recommend the Samsung 990 Pro M.2 SSD.

Samsung’s 990 PRO is a very impressive offering, with some of the best performance we’ve ever seen. We are reaching maturity in the PCIe 4.0 era, and while Gen 5 drives are on the horizon as both AMD and Intel are now supporting PCI Express 5.0 on their platforms, it is nice to see optimizations to real-world performance that will provide a noticeable improvement to your system, regardless of PCIe revision.

The 2TB 990 Pro is, in many respects, the fastest SSD we’ve tested. This high-end PCIe 4.0 drive excels everywhere it matters, is relatively efficient, and has an optional high-power mode. It would be great inside a PC, a laptop, or your PS5. An optional heatsink with RGB is the cherry on top.

Overall, performance of the Samsung SSD 990 Pro is excellent. It doesn’t lead the pack across the board versus some of the other speedy SSDs currently on the market in the synthetic tests, but the Samsung SSD 990 Pro performs very well where it matters most—at lower queue depths and in the real-world trace-based tests. In fact, the Samsung SSD 990 Pro put up the best PCMark Storage score we’ve seen to-date.

Samsung has been left looking uncharacteristically off the pace when it comes to premium PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD performance recently. The new Samsung 990 Pro fixes that, delivering performance comparable with the very best Gen 4 drives. That said, it isn't a game changer—we’ll likely have to wait for the new generation of PCIe 5 drives for that—and its 4K random performance is just a tiny bit disappointing.

With the release of the 990 Pro, Samsung took the best features from its 980 Pro SSD, beloved by scores of gamers, and made them better. The result is the world's fastest PCIe Gen 4 drive with solid thermal management and plenty of storage configurations that will satiate the demand of hard-core gamers, data scientists, video and 3D artists, and creative professionals.