It’s been a while recently upgraded its high-end internal SSDs, and those looking for more performance and power efficiency from system storage may be interested in the new model. The 990 Evo appears to be the true successor to the Samsung 970 Evo Plus .
Samsung says the 990 Evo is compatible with PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 4.0 interfaces to ensure it works in a wide range of systems. It is said to deliver performance improvements of up to 43 percent over the 970 Evo plus, with read speeds of up to 5,000MB/s and write speeds of up to 4,200MB/s.
It’s worth noting that read speeds are still slightly below Sony’s recommended 5500MB/s for any given application. . That said, I’m using a 980 series SSD (max read speed 3500MB/s) on my PS5 and haven’t experienced any lag when running games from it.
The 990 Evo is said to offer up to 70 percent energy efficiency improvements over the 970 Evo Plus. This can help extend the battery life of laptops that use SSDs. In addition, Samsung says the drive has a heat-dissipating label, which is said to effectively regulate thermal conditions and allow the SSD to run at sustained high performance without risking its integrity.
There is another useful feature that comes in the form of support for Microsoft Modern Standby. This, according to Samsung, allows for “instant on/off functionality with an uninterrupted internet connection and uninterrupted notification reception even in low-power states.”
The 990 Evo starts at $125 for 1TB of storage. It’ll run you $210 for the double-capacity version. The SSD comes with a five-year limited warranty.
