Final Thoughts on the Samsung 990 Gen4 Solid State Drive
When Samsung pitched this drive to us they said it was the perfect balance of speed, power efficiency, and value. So lets look into those claims. When it comes to speed this is definitely not the fastest PCIe 4.0 drive out there, but it does have respectable advertised speeds of 7150 MB/s read (1TB version) and 6450 MB/s write. Sadly in our testing we really only saw that read speed in CrystalDiskMark, in ATTO Disk Benchmark we didn’t even hit 6GB/s for either the read or the write tests. This seems to be an issue with Samsung drives as we saw the same underperforming issues with writes in our Samsung 990 Evo Plus review. We ran our tests multiple times with the same results sadly.
When it comes to power efficiency Samsung has delivered here as they have in the past. With the new V-NAND that Samsung is using here they have cut power consumption by up to 38% compared to previous models.
And then finally we come to value. First off Samsung is backing this drive with a 3-year warranty, which I would say is pretty standard for consumer solid state drives. At launch the MSRP of the 990 will be $269.99 for the 1TB and $529.99 for the 2TB. Yes this is the current world we are living in where a 1TB drive is this expensive! Sadly, even with storage prices how they are right now this drive still carries a premium as you can get many other PCIe 4.0 drives, many with better performance, and a 5-year warranty, for less. I think Samsung should have been a bit more aggressive with pricing especially when you can get better performing drives for less.
If you are looking for a very capable game drive, secondary drive, or even a drive to replace an aging 2.5-inch solid state drive the Samsung 990 will fit the bill. It gives you some of the best PCIe 4.0 speeds available from a Samsung drive and has very good temperatures.
At least based on our testing and what Samsung is offering here it seems they sort of dropped the ball on this one. Even if we have perfect performance (which we didn’t), the drive still carries a premium over other drives without even having a 5-year warranty. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Samsung 990 a 7 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Reached advertised speeds in some of our tests
– Does not overheat or thermally throttle
– Single-sided
– All in-house design by Samsung
Cons:
– Underperformed in many of our tests
– Only a 3-year warranty
– Price compared to other drives