Samsung Launches the 990 EVO Plus SSD, Comes in Sizes up to 4 TB

[dgianstefani]

Dang, and I just bought a couple of 990 Pros too this month. Oh well, it seems like they are not so different in price that I'd have to worry.

Pros are better so no need for buyer's regret.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Did they mention the controller name @TheLostSwede ?

Nope, this was the only information they released. Haven't seen it mentioned by any other publication either.

 

[DigitalDude]

so currently which model is better for an NVMe 2TB with DRAM drive?

 

[ymdhis]

Pros are better so no need for buyer's regret.

The only reason I'd have regret is because they are a massive overkill for what I need, and possibly also because they will be too expensive to replace if they break. But hey, if they last ten years, then I'll say it was a great buy.

 

[Chrispy_]

so currently which model is better for an NVMe 2TB with DRAM drive?

Just about all of the NVMe 2TB drives with DRAM are decent, because AFAIK if there's enough budget for DRAM, then they're not wasting it on garbage QLC offerings, so they're all TLC at least.

The best one is the one that's priced best in your region. Frequently that means the SN850X, the P41+, and the KC3000. NM790 is often priced well too...

 

[Baba]

It has been years since anyone from the tech media dared to draw a graph about when SSDs will achieve parity with HDDs for capacity and for cost per GB - it used to be a very popular topic that produced lots of forecasts and nice graphs, of which absolutely none really held true. We have been forecasted price parity "in a few years" practically since 2012, but 12 years later journalists have apparently gave up.

This graph was produced on Reddit, and it's again showing price parity in about 5 years. It is of course using cheapest price per TB available, so it of course looks at cheaper, older drives and lower capacity. I guess if you made it for maximum available capacity the SSD line would practically flatline for the last 4 years - which wasn't the case before 2020, arrival of M.2 and total stagnation of maximum available capacity.

View attachment 364857

It also looks at best value with one data point per year, so even if it would be up to date (it's one year old), it wouldn't even show the terrible price gouging we had from last autumn until recently, when SSD prices finally fell to nearly pre-price hike levels. So it would take price levels for 2023 from pre-price hike, and for 2024 after it, maybe from some limited deals (Black Friday, end of year sales etc.). Right now the cheapest price per TB is still at 47.50 EUR, 53 USD - more than 50% higher than last year's entry.

Does this account for inflation?

I've been happy with Samsung SSDs even if they're more expensive. Too much at risk to be trying to save money. I've been using the 500GB 970 Evo as a boot drive for years. That one had DRAM. More recently I got a 2TB 990PRO as my gaming storage drive.

It looks like the Evo line now doesn't have DRAM. If you want DRAM, get the PRO.

Prices look cheaper than Evo at release.

 

[redeye]

so currently which model is better for an NVMe 2TB with DRAM drive?

IMO Fanxiang s770 2TB, PS5 certified… around 6400MB on ps5 install benchmark. the 4TB is a little bit slower than the 2TB.
(buy it on aliexpress from the official Fanxiang store… ) cheaper than amazon…

 

[Scour]

For me as user with many drives (in one PC) I don´t need DRAM in every drive

But DRAM-less SSDs should be cheaper than others

Hope the TPU-review will follow soon

 

[GabrielLP14]

Nope, this was the only information they released. Haven't seen it mentioned by any other publication either.

Understood, i don't think its the regular Piccolo controller since packaging doesn't seems the same, unlike they changed the IHS / Package

 

[chrcoluk]

I haven't bought a Samsung drive in so long it's ridiculous. I procured a NAS which came with Samsung 980 EVO SSDs and those failed in months because I needed a write cache for terabytes of data a day and blew through their endurance in a matter of months. Once I had my own choice of SSD I put some Solidigm P4511's in there because those have literally 15x the endurance of DRAMless nonsense that should never have been put in a storage array in the first place!

Samsung's consumer SSDs have not been competitively priced in the UK in years - frequently 20-50% more expensive than the equivalent performance/tier TLC+DRAM offerings like SN850X, P41+, or KC3000.

KC3000 might be an older drive, but it's £118 right now for 2TB whilst Samsung's 980 non-Pro, and EVO models don't even use DRAM and they're more expensive. The cheapest DRAM drive is the ancient Gen3 970 EVO Plus and that's selling for £159 from retailers, you can find it for £152 from marketplace sellers which simply isn't appealing against the faster/better/newer KC3000 at over £40 less...

To be fair to Samsung, what you just described is a enterprise workload not consumer. Did the OS on the NAS implement HMB?

 

[InVasMani]

If they can offer DRAMless PCIE Gen 5 at the pricing of Gen4 with DRAM and same capacity I'll give you free premium pass provided it doesn't have those early Gen5 throttling quirks. I'll generally always favor a NVME with DRAM unless the price gap between them is notably different. It's not as if they pair a lot of DRAM on these devices anyway either so it really can't be adding that much to cost.

 

[NC37]

Those prices...lol. You can get a pro for less one the sales.

 

[Chrispy_]

To be fair to Samsung, what you just described is a enterprise workload not consumer. Did the OS on the NAS implement HMB?

I don't think so. QNAP TS-1273 and it's only using the SSDs in a PCIe 3.0 x2 interface each.

TBH, I was quoted 1TB Samsung 970 Pros when ordering and the end result was 2TB 980 EVOs. They probably couldn't get stock and did the closest line-item substitution at the distributor they could. It's not an enterprise NAS, rather a rackmount SMB NAS, where prosumer stuff is often used instead of enterprise stuff, primarily because it's unlikely to be mission-critical where lives or jobs are at stake.

970 Pro with MLC would have been perfect, and much cheaper than the P4511 datacenter SSDs, but I warrantied the two 980 EVOs and threw their replacements in my own PCs so it was worth the effort for 4TB of free 980 EVO at home.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Funny, you can find SSD drives with DOUBLE the performance for the same money and capacity.
Is Samsung real about those callous prices??

 

[Chrispy_]

Funny, you can find SSD drives with DOUBLE the performance for the same money and capacity.
Is Samsung real about those callous prices??

What do you mean by "double"? 14.5GB/s reads, 12.6GB/s writes, 2 Million IOPS? - that's 10% faster than the fastest SSD ever tested, and those Gen5 SSDs cost twice as much as even the high asking price of this 990EVO.

Don't get me wrong, the MSRP on this 990EVO isn't appealing, but even for the best-case, synthetic benchmark numbers, "double" the performance of this drive doesn't actually exist yet which is why I'm bringing it up, and the closest thing we have to "double" the performance is horrendous value in terms of cost/TB.

In the real world application and OS performance, the fastest money-no-object SSD available isn't even 50% faster than than the cheapest available, low-end DRAMless QLC garbage (MP700Pro is TPU's highest scoring drive vs Crucial P1 which is TPU's lowest-scoring NVMe drive)

 

[Bwaze]

Most of the time you have to really pick and choose your benchmarks to see significantly faster results in real world application (application startup, game loading times,Windows startup, installation time etc) between SATA SSD drives and fastest PCIe Gen 5 drives, bottlenecks are usually elsewhere.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

Also i just noticed, ¿why are they putting QD32 performance on a cheap consumer drive?, that's callous marketing at best.

QD32 is irrelevant even for pro users, even in the enterprise you're rarely -if ever- going to see QD32 at the individual drive level.

why aren't they listing the QD1 values as those are the imporant ones?, IOPS, throughput and response time at QD1

 

[Wirko]

Also i just noticed, ¿why are they putting QD32 performance on a cheap consumer drive?, that's callous marketing at best.

Samsung is being unusually honest here. Others won't even state te QD, which means they used whatever setting it took to reach their "up to" IOPS.

 

[Battler624]

But why?

Increases in write/read speeds are not interesting and affect almost of value.