At the beginning of 2024, Samsung unveiled the 990 EVO SSD, now it is launching a Plus version that is a lot faster and offers a higher capacity option for those that need more than 2TB. The Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD supports PCIe 4.0 x4 and 5.0 x2 interfaces. It is built on a 5nm controller, the latest NAND tech (it uses TLC chips) and a nickel-coated heat shield. Samsung claims that this SSD is 73% more power efficient than its predecessor.
But let’s talk speed – the top 4TB model
offers industry-leading random access operations, 1,050K IOPS input and 1,400K
IOPS output. Sequential access can reach 7,250MB/s reads and 6,300MB/s writes.
For comparison, the vanilla 990 EVO does 700K IOPS input and 800K IOPS output,
sequential speeds are 5,000MB/s reads and 4,200MB/s writes. In other words, the
EVO Plus is 50% faster than the regular EVO. Note that the EVOs lack on-board
DRAM (they use the host RAM instead), but Samsung claims that the EVO Plus
performance “nearly rivals” that of SSDs with DRAM.
The Samsung 990 EVO Plus is optimized for
gaming, business and creative tasks. It comes in three sizes: 1TB, 2TB and 4TB.
Note that the lower capacities have slightly slower random and sequential
speeds, but not by much. Even the base 1TB model does 7,150MB/s and 6,300MB/s
sequential read/write and 850K/1,350K IOPS random access.
The launch prices are actually lower than
what the vanilla EVO SSDs used to cost in January. The 1TB EVO Plus is $110,
while the vanilla SSD was US$ 125 (EVO prices have tumbled since then, of course).
The 2TB Plus launches at US$ 185 and the 4TB one at US$ 345.
