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23.01.2024 22:02, Mykola Khizhnyak
Earlier this month, Samsung accidentally exposed the 990 Evo’s SSD. The peculiarity of the new product is that it can operate in two modes: PCIe 4.0 x4 or PCIe 5.0 x2. At the same time, the throughput of the drive remains the same in both cases. Today the manufacturer officially presented it.
Image Source: Samsung
The new product provides sequential read speeds of up to 5000 and writes of up to 4200 MB/s, as well as performance in random read and write operations at 700 thousand and 800 thousand IOPS, respectively. The drive will compete with inexpensive solutions like the TeamGroup MP44L or the more popular WD_Black SN770. The advantage of the Samsung 990 Evo NVMe SSD is the use of a more energy-efficient 5nm controller, as well as 133-layer V6P TLC NAND flash memory chips. The drive does not have its own DRAM cache and uses part of the PC memory system for these purposes.
As mentioned above, the 990 Evo can operate in PCIe 4.0 x4 or PCIe 5.0 x2 modes. According to Samsung, the hybrid drive design with PCIe 5.0 x2 interface is developed “to meet current computing needs while anticipating future device requirements» to SSD. The company did not explain what exactly this should mean.
Since the bandwidth of four PCIe 4.0 lanes and two PCIe 5.0 lanes is the same, using one or the other operating mode will not result in a loss of performance. However, using two PCIe 5.0 lanes can slightly improve the drive’s energy efficiency in certain use cases. This combination is designed to make the Samsung 990 Evo NVMe SSD a suitable choice not only for laptops, but also, for example, PS5 game consoles.
Samsung 990 Evo NVMe SSD will be offered in 1 and 2 TB versions. The first is priced at $124.99, the second at $209.99. Both models come with a five-year manufacturer’s warranty. Samsung claims a resource of 600 TBW (terabytes of overwritten information) for the smaller version, and twice as much for the older version.
