Samsung 990 EVO Plus Review: A good, if somewhat pricey SSD contender

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus mostly lives up to its speed claims, but as with any SSD, it’s best to compare prices when you’re buying.

Score: 3/5

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In this review

Specifications
Design/Installation
Performance
Conclusion

Disclaimer: Samsung Australia sent me the Samsung 990 EVO Plus for review as a “long term loan”, which pretty much means they’re unlikely to ask for it back. That has no effect on my review, Samsung gets no editorial input — it simply means I’m reviewing it, but I do think that full upfront ethical disclosure is important. Now on with the review…

Design

It's an SSD shaped like... an SSD. Who could have predicted THAT?

SSDs have to fit to specific form factors, so there’s typically not much you can say about them from a design standpoint.

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus fits the 2880 M.2 specification if you’re after specific sizing/fitting information, but otherwise this is a drive that in nearly any conceivable situation going to be used and not seen anyway.

As such, installation is also the same as any other SSD drive depending more on the system you’re installing it into. One slight grumble here if you’re not ready for it is that the Samsung 990 EVO Plus comes as a drive, slender installation manual… and that’s all, so if you need an M.2 mounting screw you’re going to have to supply that yourself.

No prizes for guessing what I had to scramble to find in order to install it into a desktop PC…

It is also I suppose worth pointing out if you were planning to stuff the Samsung 990 EVO Plus into a PlayStation 5 that the drive ships without a heatsink, so you would also need to source one of those to fit if that’s your plan.

To be clear, I have not installed it into my PS5, so I can’t comment there on fit or function, though it should meet the Sony’s minimum drive specifications (heatsink notwithstanding) pretty easily.

Performance

Samsung’s big claim around the Samsung 990 EVO Plus is that it’s considerably faster than the prior 990 EVO drive. Up to 45% as per Samsung, thanks to the use of Samsung’s 8th generation V-NAND technology and a 5nm onboard controller.

Samsung’s claims for the Samsung 990 EVO Plus is that it’s capable of up to 7,250MB/s read and up to 6,300MB/s write speeds. There is a slight catch here, because the 1TB model drops those speeds slightly down to 7,150MB/s read speeds, though write speeds stay the same at 6,300Mbps. The model supplied to me by Samsung Australia was the 2TB variant, so it should be capable of the best possible speeds.

That’s in theory, but how does that play out in actual usage?

Here I do have a testing limitation, because I don’t have a large bank of SSDs to hand to comparatively test nor a database of prior tests to compare against.

I installed the Samsung 990 EVO Plus into a desktop PC that was also running a somewhat cheaper and older Lexar NM790 2TB drive. Here’s how the two drives compared using Crystal Disk Mark’s benchmark:

You might think that the more expensive Samsung drive would dominate, but that’s not what happened. It’s still hitting appreciably close to Samsung’s claimed speeds however, which is at least pleasing at a baseline level.

Samsung provides its own storage management software, Samsung Magician, although this isn’t on the drive by default as you might find with some older external hard drives (or maybe I’m dating myself there…).

Samsung Magician is nice and easy to use -- but it's not preinstalled.

Samsung Magician also includes an internal benchmark, and while I’m wary of using a specific in-house tool for obvious potential bias reasons, I gave it a spin to see how it stacked the two drives against each other:

The Samsung drive compares a little closer there, and in one sense it’s a validation of the Magician software that there doesn’t appear to be much juicing in favour of the in-house SSD, but it does point to how there’s a wider array of drives to choose from when you’re hunting for storage.

Samsung Magician’s benchmark suite also allows for testing for IOPS performance, which is useful when considering both data access speeds and power usage, and here the Samsung 990 EVO Plus does show its chops in terms of being potentially very good for laptop enhancement. Here’s how it compares:

While I do have to note that I’m working from a very limited pool of results here, that’s in every way a resounding win for the Samsung drive, and that does point to a potential uptick in certain performance scenarios, as well as the possibility for better power performance over time.

For my tested desktop setup that’s less relevant, but it could be a good determining factor when buying an SSD to add to (or as a replacement) in a notebook, as long as you've got a notebook that can handle an SSD replacement/upgrade -- many models, including all models of Apple's MacBook lineup (like the recently tested MacBook Pro M4) rather explicitly do not.

Samsung 990 EVO Plus: Alex’s Verdict

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus mostly lives up to its storage claims, though Samsung does charge something of a premium for it.

The 1TB drive sells for $195 locally, while the 2TB model tested costs $319 and the 4TB model tops out the field at $629.

You don’t have to do much digging to find a few discounted drives cheaper than that (at least at the time of writing), but that’s also true across the wider SSD field.

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus is a decent drive, but it’s a decent drive in a very competitive space at a slightly higher price than much of its competition, without necessarily having the raw speed to back it up.

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