The Breaker Times

Samsung 990 Pro

MSRP $180.00

“Let’s not mince words — the Samsung 990 Pro is insanely fast.”

Pros

• Crazy fast
• Options with and without a heatsink
• Capacity up to 4TB
• Several features through Samsung Magician

Cons

• Overkill for the PS5
• Heatsink is impractical for most

I won’t waste your time here. The Samsung 990 Pro is the best SSD you can buy right now. It’s crazy fast, particularly when it comes to large file transfers, and despite a relatively high price, Samsung justifies the cost with extra features that few other brands go out of their way to fuss with.

The particular model I’m looking at here, the Samsung 990 Pro 2TB with heatsink, may not be the right pick for everyone, though. Although it’s a very fast drive, the extra cost of the heatsink and its slant toward expanding the storage inside the PlayStation 5 doesn’t make sense, and you can save some money with a slower drive while achieving similar levels of gaming performance.

Performance outside of games is a different matter, however, which is where the 990 Pro truly stands out. If you want to learn more about SSD performance and how it varies between applications, make sure to check out our SSD buying guide.

Pricing and specs

Samsung has remained the go-to brand for NVMe SSD for many years, and it’s clear why. You’re getting close to the maximum bandwidth of a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, with Samsung touting sequential read speeds of up to 7,450MB/s. My testing backs up Samsung’s claims, making this one of the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs you can currently buy.

Unlike most other SSDs on the market, Samsung is using its own in-house NAND and controller for the 990 Pro, which generally makes it less prone to hardware swaps after launch. Other SSD brands that outsource NAND and controllers can run into supply issues and swap out components, sometimes at the cost of advertised speed. Thankfully, that’s not the case here. You’re also getting small amount of DDR4 as a cache, speeding up the performance of the drive.

Pricing is where things get interesting. This model of the 990 Pro is heavily targeted toward the PS5 due to having its own heatsink. That bit of extra metal drives up the price. At 2TB, you can save $10 by going with the 990 Pro model without a heatsink. And if you go up to 4TB, you’ll save $30. That’s compared to Samsung’s own 990 Pro, too. If you shop for a drive like the WD Black SN850X, you’ll get similar speeds for much less money — sans the heatsink.

Most modern motherboards have heatsinks for the SSD drives, and in fact, the extra heatsink size can interfere with your other components. This is really a drive built for other applications, such as the PS5 Pro, or a mini PC with enough space but no heatsink, such as the Minisforum AtomMan G7 Ti.

Software and features

Samsung may have fast drives, but it also has excellent management software. I wouldn’t blame you for ignoring the bundled software with most SSDs, but Samsung Magician has a lot of options, and it’s worth taking up a bit of space to install the application.

You get some high-level stats, such as drive health, and you can perform a benchmark and diagnostic to see how your drive is performing. More importantly, Samsung gives you a ton of options to tweak the performance of your drive. You can turn on TRIM to let deleted blocks surface again for writing, as well as prevent the SSD from sleeping for maximum performance. Samsung also has over-provisioning options to increase the life span of the drive.

Beyond performance, you have encryption options, data migration, and a proper erase function. This will restructure all of the data on the drive so it can’t be recovered with forensics.

Performance

Setting the scene, CrystalDiskMark shows that the 990 Pro with heatsink actually reaches a bit above Samsung’s advertised speeds, both for sequential reads and writes. We’re getting close to maxing out the available bandwidth on a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, at least for sequential reads and writes. That’s not what your drive is going to be doing most of the time, however.

Looking at real applications provides some important context, as the margins between the 990 Pro 2TB and a much cheaper (and slower) drive like the WD Blue SN5000 shrink considerably. In large file transfers, which you can see in my AJA Video Systems test, the 990 Pro reigns supreme. There are some minor differences between the 1TB and 2TB models I tested, but not a big enough difference to note.

In games, however, the 990 Pro 2TB with heatsink actually fell behind the pack. Both the SN5000 and regular 990 Pro posted better results in 3DMark — which actually loads games through the benchmark — and Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail. The 2TB 990 Pro isn’t far behind, and when we’re talking about margins of half a second, you’ll never notice a meaningful difference in performance. On paper, however, it’s a bit behind.

Should you buy the Samsung 990 Pro?

If you’re looking for one of the fastest SSDs on the market for your PC, the Samsung 990 Pro hits that mark squarely. There’s no doubt that the Samsung 990 Pro is a fast SSD, but I’m not sure going with this specific model is the right call for the PS5. There are a couple of important reasons why.

First, the heatsink. There are only a few instances where an SSD calls for a heatsink, and even in those cases, you probably won’t reach damaging temperatures without one. If you plan on putting the 990 Pro inside a PC, save yourself some money and go with the heatsink-free model.

The bigger issue is the speed for gaming. This drive is heavily targeted toward the PS5, which is a platform that really can’t take advantage of the extra speed on offer. In games, even the objectively slower SN5000 is putting up similar results, and you can pick up that drive for $120 — a clean $60 less than the 990 Pro 2TB with heatsink.

The best use case for a drive this fast isn’t gaming — most PCIe 4.0 SSDs are plenty for gaming, with only minor differences in loading speed. The 990 Pro really shines when it comes to large file transfers, where its sustained speed advantage really shows up clearly. In that context, the 990 Pro is worth spending up for.