Samsung has spent years at or near the top of the consumer SSD market, and the 990 1TB SSD targets people who want an upgrade without paying flagship prices. It reads at up to 7,150 MB/s, turning a game install from a coffee break into something that finishes before you’ve walked back to your desk. Eighth-generation V-NAND and a 5nm controller do the heavy lifting underneath, and a nickel-coated heat shield keeps the drive from cooking itself during a long transfer. What separates it from most drives in this range is that it runs on either PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0, so it drops into a current motherboard or an older one without you checking a compatibility list first. The M.2 2280 form factor fits a desktop tower and most laptops built in the last several years, and Samsung rates it at 600 TBW with a five-year warranty.
Head over to Amazon to get the Samsung 990 1TB SSD for just $200, down from its usual price of $230. That’s a $30 discount and 13% off.
An expansive hard drive to help hold all your important files and documents
What makes this SSD unique is its dual-interface capability. Unlike other SSDs that support only PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0, the Samsung 990 supports both. While most motherboards only have PCIe 4.0 slots, the drive runs in a single x4 configuration or a two-lane x2 configuration, depending on what you have. Users with systems with two-lane Gen 5 slots can also take advantage of this feature, as can users with RAID cards that provide two lanes to each drive.
Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0, a type of write caching technology, assigns a portion of the drive to serve as a high-speed write cache. This helps large file transfers continue at maximum speed rather than dropping off once the cache fills. Photographers working on a laptop will appreciate this, because it helps prevent stalling mid-transfer while moving folders of RAW images or batches of 4K video clips from media cards onto their SSD storage.
Another way the Samsung 990 differs from other SSDs is through Host Memory Buffer (HMB) Technology. Rather than using onboard DRAM as a cache, HMB allows the drive to borrow a small section of system RAM. This brings random performance closer to what you’d expect from traditional DRAM-based SSDs. Because there’s no cost to add DRAM to a drive like this, that’s one reason it’s positioned at this price point. Gamers and everyday PC users may find it hard to distinguish the performance offered by these different cache types.
Samsung Magician is an application for updating your drive’s firmware, monitoring how much space you’ve used, running benchmark tests to measure performance, and enabling hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption to secure the data. This encryption method differs from other applications, which can use your computer’s processor to encrypt data as it’s written and slow down the host computer. This version uses the drive’s processor to handle encryption and won’t impact the host computer at all. Also included with the purchase of the Samsung 990 at $200, down from $230, is a five-year limited warranty, and the M.2 2280 form factor will fit almost all desktop motherboards, as well as many laptops produced over the past few years.