Faisal Ghaffar 
One of the first SSD makers offering a product for PCle 4.0NVMe was Samsung, as it launched the 980 Pro and its design was above that the alternative offerings in the market. Even today, it is considered a great choice for workstation users and gamers. But, the problem with being early in the field of technology is that your competitors get a chance to learn from your mistakes and use it to come up with their own designs. This is what Seagate, Sabrent and Kingston did when they came up with Gen 4 designs.
Now, Samsung is hoping to stir up the cauldron once more with the 990 Pro. Let’s take a look at it.
Design and build
Samsung likely needs a new name, as the 990 Pro is just the latest in a long list of 900 series SSDs that the company has introduced and its build is not very different from most of the 2280 spec M.2 NVMedrives. The upside of the board has all of the components, but labels have been used for discreetly hiding them from view.
It is best to get a heatsink-installed design because of the 990 Pro’s potential for heat generation and high throughput. It has the same number of components and flash modules as the 980 Pro, but has a smarter controller, as Samsung opted to create it in-house.
Specs and features
The controller is likely derived from the one that had been developed for the 980 Pro series called Elpis, but Samsung has not named this one. Hardware encryption is also supported by the 990 Pro, something that many other brands do not offer. The TurboWrite 2.0 technology has been added to the 990 Pro that there is 226GB of buffered space available on the 2TB drive before it writes to the NAND.
The new controller also offers greater power efficiency and the power consumption of the 990 Pro is between 5.0 W and 5.1 W.
Performance
The read speed of the 990 Pro is around 7,450MB/s, which means it is about 6% faster than its predecessor. Write speeds are around 6,900MB/s in all models, but there is a change in IOPs in the 1 TB and 2TB drives. The larger drive obviously offers better performance, but the smaller one is also nothing to be coughed at. The write performance, in particular, has been quite enhanced in both versions.
In terms of all aspects of performance, you will find that the Samsung 990 Pro truly stands out in terms of consistency.
Price
Given that it is the fastest Gen 4 technology NVMedrive, you will be surprised to see that the price of the Samsung 990 Pro is not that high. It costs about $169.99 for the 1TB model and $304.99 for the 2TB one. But, these prices are without a heatsink and will go up if you opt for one with a heatsink.
The Verdict
There is no denying that the 990 Pro is a vast improvement over the 980 Pro and other competing products. It is the quickest Gen 4 drive in the market and itsprice is also quite reasonable, but may be a tad higher than competitors.
