The Samsung SSD 990 Pro (starts at $169.99; $289.99 for 2TB as tested), the company's flagship PCI Express 4.0 internal solid-state drive, has a hard act to follow—we gave the SSD 980 Pro 4.5 stars and an Editors' Choice award—but for the most part makes a great product even better. This power-efficient drive gets high marks for raw speed, everyday application performance, a strong software suite, and hardware-based encryption. It doesn't quite match its predecessor's rating because other recent internal SSDs outpaced it in our gaming benchmarks, but its overall capability makes this Samsung a versatile drive well-suited for creative tasks.

A Power-Efficient Pro

The 990 Pro is manufactured on an M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) "gumstick" printed circuit board and uses the NVMe protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus. It combines Samsung MLC 3-bit V-NAND flash memory with a homegrown controller that Samsung says is the first on a consumer SSD to employ 8-nanometer architecture. The new silicon, the company claims, improves power efficiency by up to 50% compared to the 980 Pro. (Unfamiliar with M.2 and PCIe jargon? Check out our guide to SSD terminology.)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The standard version of the 990 Pro we tested bears a heat-spreading label; for an extra $20 you can buy the drive with a full-fledged heatsink. You can see the available options below; Samsung says it will add a 4TB version of the SSD next year.

The 990 Pro's durability ratings (expressed in terms of lifetime write capacity in total terabytes written or TBW) equal those of several other PCIe 4.0 speedsters, including its predecessor. The Crucial P5 Plus and the WD Black SN850 and SN850X are also rated at 600TBW and 1,200TBW for 1TB and 2TB respectively. A few PCI Express 4.0 drives offer substantially higher durability ratings; the MSI Spatium M470, for example, is rated at 1,600TBW for 1TB and 3,300TBW for 2TB. At the other extreme, the Mushkin Delta, which uses less durable QLC memory, is rated at just 200TBW for 1TB, 400TBW for 2TB, and 800TBW for 4TB.

The terabytes-written spec is a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. Samsung warranties the SSD 990 Pro for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Samsung’s software includes the Samsung Magician utility and the company's Data Migration app. The former handles firmware upgrades, performance optimization, and troubleshooting. It's fairly easy to use, and I appreciate that it includes Encrypted Drive, a simple option to activate the 990 Pro's built-in hardware-level 256-bit AES encryption. You can also use the Magician app to enable over-provisioning to free up more memory blocks and improve performance.

Testing the Samsung SSD 990 Pro: Raw Speed Abounds

We test PCIe 4.0 internal SSDs using a desktop testbed with an MSI X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen CPU, 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory clocked to 3,600MHz, and a discrete Nvidia GeForce graphics card.

We put the Samsung SSD 990 Pro through our usual suite of solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, and 3DMark Storage. Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files.

In Crystal DiskMark testing, the 990 Pro effectively matched both its rated sequential read and sequential write speeds, both of which are among the highest we've seen from a PCI Express 4.0 internal SSD and considerably faster than those of Samsung's 980 Pro. In Crystal DiskMark's s 4K Read and Write tests, which measure how long it takes to load and save a group of files accessed in 4K cluster sizes, the drive delivered more average scores, with the write score slightly the better of the two.

In the PCMark 10 Overall Storage benchmark, which measures a drive's speed in everyday tasks such as loading games and launching the Windows operating system and assorted applications, the 990 Pro delivered the second highest score in our test group, trailing only the SK Hynix Platinum P41.

The Samsung's results in PCMark trace testing, which evaluate some of the individual components that go into the overall score, were mostly in the middle of the pack, although the drive did lead the field in launching Adobe Premiere Pro and copying small files. The 990 Pro was only an average performer in the game-launching traces and in the 3DMark Storage benchmark, which measures a drive's proficiency in a variety of gaming-related tasks.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Verdict: A Versatile PCI Express 4.0 Speedster

The Samsung SSD 990 Pro is a big step forward from the SSD 980 Pro, with considerably faster sequential read and write speeds and a much higher PCMark 10 Overall score. Like its predecessor, it includes the capable Samsung Magician software and 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption. The standard version includes a heat-spreading sticker and is compatible with Sony's PlayStation 5; you can buy the drive with a full-fledged heatsink for $20 more.

Samsung's marketing materials for the 990 Pro include the phrase "Blistering speed, endless victory." But while the drive indeed gets high marks for raw speed, its gaming performance—as measured by PCMark 10 traces and 3DMark Storage—was merely in the middle of the range of what we expect from a premium SSD, trailing the SK Hynix Platinum P41 and WD Black SN850X. That knocks it from 4.5 to four stars on our ratings scale, but the 990 Pro does offer respectable gaming performance while being a thoroughbred workhorse for creative tasks. It's an appealing choice for many buyers and a worthy upgrade from the 980 Pro.