Samsung has taken an interesting approach to PCIe Gen5 when it comes to storage. Their first Gen 5 offering was the 990 Evo, which did not really challenge the high-end Phison-based Gen5 drives already out, instead it was a more mainstream DRAMless drive. What was interesting about it, is that it only had 2 lanes of PCIe Gen 5, which is essentially the same as 4 lanes of PCIe Gen4. The new Samsung 990 Evo Plus is very much the same, still DRAMless and the same 2 Gen5 lanes. You are going to get better performance than the original 990 Evo, but on top of that better efficiency. According to Samsung the 990 Evo Plus has 73% higher power efficiency. This is made possible by their 8th generation 232-layer TLC NAND and firmware optimizations. This also mitigates a lot of the heat issues associated with faster M.2 solid state drives. We are taking a look at the 2TB model here today which has sequential read speeds of 7250 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 6300 MB/s.
Special thanks to Samsung for providing us with the 990 Evo Plus Solid State Drive to review.
Specifications of the Samsung 990 Evo Plus Solid State Drive
Packaging of the Samsung 990 Evo Plus Solid State Drive
The 990 Evo Plus comes in Samsung’s typical retail packaging for SSDs which is all blue and we have a picture of the drive on the front. It also lets us know the capacity and speed.
Flipping over to the back there is a little more information on the drive.
Opening the box up all you’ll find is the drive itself and an installation guide / warranty statement.
