Samsung has officially launched the Samsung 990, an M.2 NVMe solid-state drive targeted at the entry-level market. It should be noted that this new product is different from the previous 990 EVO that used TLC flash memory particles. The new Samsung 990 uses QLC NAND flash memory and relies on master-level algorithm optimization to ensure performance.
In terms of hardware specifications, the Samsung 990 adopts the standard M.2-2280 appearance size, supports the M.2 NVMe Gen 4 (PCI-Express 4.0 x4) interface, and is equipped with Samsung's self-developed Piccolo-Q cacheless (DRAMless) main control chip and its own V9 series 280-layer 3D QLC NAND flash memory particles.
The Samsung 990 released this time offers two capacity versions for consumers to choose from, with the 1TB version priced at US$270 and the 2TB version priced at US$530. In terms of specific read and write performance, the 1TB version has a maximum sequential read speed of 7150 MB/s, a maximum sequential write speed of 6450 MB/s, and 4K random read and write performance of 700,000 IOPS and 1.1 million IOPS respectively. The performance of the 2TB version is slightly better, with the maximum sequential read speed increased to 7250 MB/s, the sequential write speed the same as 6450 MB/s, and the 4K random read and write reaching 850,000 IOPS and 1.2 million IOPS respectively.
In terms of write endurance, which is a common concern among consumers, due to the use of QLC flash memory, there is a significant difference between the new 990 and the TLC-based 990 EVO Plus. The 2TB version of the Samsung 990 has a write endurance of 800 TBW, while the 1TB version only has 400 TBW. As an intuitive comparison reference, the 2TB and 1TB versions of the 990 EVO Plus with the same capacity can provide write life of 1200 TBW and 600 TBW respectively. In addition, these two newly launched Samsung 990 products only provide a three-year warranty service.