Samsung’s speedy 990 Pro SSD takes your gaming to the next level
If you must, you can use it for work, too
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What you need to know
Samsung’s latest flagship 990 Pro series solid-state drive delivers even faster performance and superior power efficiency that will help take your gaming to the next level. But it’s not all fun and play, as the 990 Pro is also capable of boosting your productivity. Samsung claims that the 990 Pro is ideally suited for 3D rendering, data analysis, and 4K video editing tasks.
Compared to the prior generation, the 990 Pro’s claim to fame is that it outperforms the 980 Pro by 55% in random performance. Samsung’s testing showed that the newSSDis capable of sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,450 megabytes per second and 6,900 MB/s, respectively. The 990 Pro also clocked up to 1,400K and 1,550K IOPS for random read and write performance, respectively. In addition to the boost in performance, the 990 Pro also benefits from a 50% improvement in power efficiency compared to its predecessor.
“When tested with Forspoken, Luminous Productions’ forthcoming action role-playing game supporting the latest game-loading technology, the map loading time was about one second, compared to four seconds for a SATA SSD and 28 seconds for a hard disk drive (HDD),” Samsung extolled of the drive’s benefit.
The PCIe 4.0-driven 990 Pro starts at $179, and the drive will be available in 1, 2, or 4TB capacities. The drive comes in the M.2 (2280) form factor, and it utilizes Samsung’s proprietary V-NAND 3-bit TLC memory architecture and custom controller help drive the performance boost this year. To keep things performing optimally, Samsung also has a Dynamic Thermal Guard technology that helps the drive remain within an optimal temperature range.
PC gamers looking for a performance boost and needing RGB lighting can turn to the 990 Pro with Heatsink variant, which adds more thermal control. Enthusiast gamers won’t experience any performance degradation when the drive is taxed, Samsung said.Console gamerswho opt for the Heatsink variant won’t be able to benefit from the added RGB lighting, however, as the PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X do not come with a see-through case.
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Chuong’s passion for gadgets began with the humble PDA. Since then, he has covered a range of consumer and enterprise devices, raning from smartphones to tablets, laptops to desktops and everything in between for publications like Pocketnow, Digital Trends, Wareable, Paste Magazine, and TechRadar in the past before joining the awesome team at Windows Central. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, when not working, he likes exploring the diverse and eclectic food scene, taking short jaunts to wine country, soaking in the sun along California’s coast, consuming news, and finding new hiking trails.
