Samsung 990 Pro 4TB SSD Review – Performance. Capacity. Warranty and Value. A Must Have.

I am going to date myself acknowledging that I used to watch Star Trek as a child but can safely say that I was never a Star Trek fanatic.  Still, after testing this new Samsung 990 Pro 4TB NVMe M.2 SSD over the last week, Star Trek and far too many ‘warp speed’ quotes came to mind.  The 990 Pro is one of the meanest SSDs we have ever had the pleasure of ripping apart (meant in a good way of course) and we think this report can just as easily convince you of that as well.

It is actually rather bittersweet seeing Samsung jump to this 4TB capacity as, historically, they have always sat in the weeds with higher capacities and relied on what they knew would sell right then and there.  There have been many boardroom meetings between us in all around the world over the years where I have always stressed that Samsung need to lead the pack in all areas; speed, warranty, value and most definitely capacity.  So here we are… Samsung stepping out with a 4TB SSD that has already been built on the success of the 990 Pro name.

The 990 Pro is a PCIe 4.0 four lane (x4) M.2 SSD of the 2280 (22mm wide by 80mm long) form factor and it uses the latest NVMe 1.4 protocol.  This SSD lists performance at 7450MB/s read and 6900MB/s write with up to 1550K IOPS and has AES 256-bit full disk encryption, TCG/Opal 2.0 and Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667) data security.  A definite benefit with this SSD is that it is available in 1,2 or 4TB capacities and performance is the same for all.

The Samsung 990 pro is single sided.  Not only that, it runs cool as an SSD should which means it is probably the first choice in SSDs today to get thrown into an ultrabook, laptop, or even PS5.

ON the front of this SSD, we see the Samsung ‘Pascal’ PCIe 4.0 NVMe 8nm controller along with a 4GB LPDDR4 memory buffer, 1GB buffer for the 1TB capacity and 2GB for the 2TB.  Wait a minute!  Have we seen a DRAM cache chip on a single sided SSD before?  As well TBW for the 990 Pro is set at 600 (1TB),1200 (2TB) and 2400 (4TB).

This also means that each of those 8th Gen 236-layer 1024Gbit V-NAND flash chips is 2TB in capacity.  We could easily bump this to an 8TB dual-sided drive Samsung.  And for speed, the 4TB is running at 2400MT, something many just dreamed of not so long ago.

Pricing.  The 4TB version has a MSRP of $345 which we are going to bet is simply a safe price to start with.  It definitely isn’t indicative of the pricing we are seeing at the lower capacities with the 1TB available now for $69.99  and the 2TB at $134.99.  Check Amazon pricing.

Now let’s take a look at some metrics.