In our Samsung 990 Pro review we were impressed by its chart-topping speed, for a PCie 4.0 drive, but found its price a bit high. Well, prices have tumbled since then making it an excellent choice, even if it isn’t listed on our best SSD for gaming guide, and now Samsung has made it even more compelling by making a larger-capacity 4TB Samsung 990 Pro.
While several 4TB, and even some 8TB, M.2 drives do exist, they’re still fairly uncommon so another choice is always welcome, especially with games occupying ever-vaster amounts of storage – we’re looking at you, Starfield, with your 140GB install size.
This is also a notably fast drive. Its rated speeds are 7,450MB/s sequential read and 6,900MB/s sequential write, while its random input/output operations (IOPs) are 1,400,000 read and 1,550,000 write. The likes of the Solidigm P44 Pro and WD Black SN850X come close to those figures but can’t surpass them.
Powering the new 4TB Samsung 990 Pro is an in-house Samsung controller and Samsung’s own TLC V-NAND flash. It also has a 4GB LPPDR4 cache for read and write speed boosting.
Performance of the drive is the same as the 2TB version but the extra capacity also gets you double the write endurance. This drive is rated to 2,400TBW, which should allow for many years of use even when moving vast amounts of data around. The drive also comes with a five-year warranty.
The drive will be available with and without a heatsink, giving users the choice of sticking with a 3rd-party or motherboard-supplied M.2 heatsink, or using the Samsung-supplied one. The 4TB Samsung 990 Pro price hasn’t yet been revealed but we’d expect it to be in line with other 4TB PCie 4 SSDs, at around $300.
Have you taken advantage of the ever-falling SSD prices of recent times or are you still rocking a 1TB M.2 boot drive? Let us know your thoughts on the Custom PC Facebook page, via Twitter, or join our Custom PC and Gaming Setup Facebook group and tap into the knowledge of our 400,000+ members.