Samsung released a brand new SSD recently, and this 990 Evo Plus is aimed towards a more affordable market. It is available in 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB variants – and ours here is the 2TB version. It’s actually rather affordable too, as it starts from $109.99 for the 1TB, and goes up to $344.99 for the 4TB variant.
With such high capacity with supremely high advertised speed on the box, there surely will be a catch, right? Let’s explore what this SSD has to offer.
Let’s talk about the unboxing first. As far as I know, the packaging is very similar to what we had on the 990 Evo, but we didn’t get to review that – so I can’t compare them.
Anyway, the packaging is really simple and the documentations are hidden behind this pouch that I am going to ignore entirely since it doesn’t actually provide me with anything useful.
Looking at the SSD itself, the first thing that caught my attention is the use of just a single NAND chip for 2TB worth of storage. This is Samsung’s die with this model number – K9DYGY8J5B-CCK0 – and it is Samsung’s 236-Layer V8 TLC NAND flash. TLC is much better than QLC, which should last longer and perform better than QLC NAND flash which we’re seeing on even more affordable SSDs.
As for the controller, the Samsung 990 Evo Plus is equipped with Samsung’s own Piccolo series of controller, and this controller can work in two different protocols. It can either work in either PCIe Gen 4×4 mode or PCIe Gen 5×2 mode. This is an interesting hybrid approach as it doesn’t need the full bandwidth of the PCIe Gen 5×4, so it only uses 2 out of the 4 available lanes. We’ll also talk about the comparison between the two protocols later.
We then installed the SSD to our testbench PC, and installed the Samsung Magician software to check if there are any firmware updates – and then proceeded with the test.
Starting with the PCIe Gen 4×4 mode, the SSD can’t really reach the theoretical maximum that the box advertises. It’s at most around 6550MB/s and 5770MB/s in both linear read and write respectively. Still, I can understand why since this 2TB variant only has a single NAND chip. Having double 1TB NAND chip would actually be the fastest since it works like having two lanes on a highway instead of just one, so files and transfers faster.
In AIDA64’s linear write speed, this test will saturate the cache. Since it SSD is DRAMless, we can see that once the cache is filled up, the write speed tanks down to around 1750MB/s write and never recovers throughout the entire test. This is expected since it is DRAMless – but the speed is much better than many other SSDs even after the cache has saturated.
Now, this is the speed that we’ll get on PCIe Gen 4×4. What if we have an even newer and better PC that can run PCIe Gen 5? Luckily, the motherboard we’re using has that as well. So, we redid all of the tests, and here are the results.
It is definitely a noticeable increase in the read speed, but the write speed remains very similar and within the margin of error. So, if you have PCIe Gen 5 on your motherboard, then you can use it to get even higher read speed. But then again, even in PCIe Gen 4×4 mode, it’s already plenty fast.
Okay, let’s now talk about the temperature. We’ve actually tested the Samsung 990 Evo Plus without any heatsinks at first in Gen 4×4 mode – and it can hit this temperature. Yeah, some sort of cooling is required – and if we just slap on the motherboard’s included heatsink – it can tame the temperature very well.
I’m not sure if the sticker on the SSD helps dissipate heat. It has this kind of texture underneath which I believe is some sort of adhesive thermal pad? Not sure how effective it is since it’s so thin and does not have a copper plate.
Should you buy the Samsung 990 Evo Plus?
So, should you buy it or not? The Samsung 990 Evo Plus, from our tests, shows that it is great in terms of performance for a DRAMless SSD. The read speed is great in PCIe Gen 4×4 mode, but even greater if we use it in Gen 5×2 mode.
As for who is this for… I can think of using it as a game drive for your Steam library or something like that. Game drives usually don’t need a lot of writing except for game installs and updates, and it’s going to read data from the SSD while loading games.
Maybe using it in an external SSD would be great as well. You can buy an external SSD enclosure like this one that I have, and then put the Samsung 990 Evo Plus inside and you’ll get an external SSD – and since this enclosure is made out of metal, it can help cool down the SSD inside as well.
As for the prices, they’re as listed here. I do think that for a DRAMless TLC SSD, it’s actually very affordably priced.
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