Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD Review: Power Efficient Speedy Storage

Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD Review: Affordable And Low Power Solid State Storage

	Samsung 990 EVO Plus: MSRP: 1TB - $110, 2TB - $185, 4TB - $345 The Samsung 990 EVO Plus family of solid state drives features Samsung's latest 8th Gen NAND flash memory for better efficiency and higher transfer speeds.
	•  Good Real-World Performance    •  Relatively Low-Power    •  PCIe Gen 4 or 5    •  Suitable For Almost Any Application	•  Somewhat High Latency

Samsung is launching its latest mainstream series of solid state drives today, the 990 EVO Plus. As has been tradition with Samsung, the company has fleshed out its 990-series of SSDs with Pro, EVO, and now EVO Plus models. Just like previous-gen drives, the 990 EVO Plus takes the EVO series and cranks things up a few notches, with more advanced NAND flash memory and tweaked and tuned firmware to optimize performance and power.

Take a gander at the Samsung SSD 990 EVO Plus’ main features and specifications below, and then we’ll dig in deeper to see how the drive compares to an array of competitive offerings, including Samsung’s own drives, in an array of benchmarks.

Samsung SSD 990 EVO Plus Specifications And Features

The new Samsung 990 EVO Plus series of solid state drives will initially be offered in three capacities, ranging from 1TB on up to a healthy 4TB. We have a 2TB model on hand for testing, which is what you’ll see pictured here.

All of the drives in the Samsung 990 EVO Plus series use the same M.2 (2280) "gumstick" form factor and offer peak read bandwidth of up to 7.15GB/s – 7.25GB/s, with write bandwidth that tops out at 6.3GB/s, which is a significant upgrade from the original 990 EVO's 5GB/s (reads) and 4.2GB/s (writes).

The drives’ max IOPS ratings vary depending on queue depth and capacity, but peak at approximately 1,050K for reads and 1,400K for writes. The 990 EVO Plus’ endurance ratings also vary based on capacity, peaking at 2,400TBW for the big 4TB drive (coming out to 600TBW per TB). As you'd expect, endurance drops as capacities decrease, but they remain in line with competitive drives in this class.

All of the drives in the Samsung's 990 EVO Plus series feature the company's latest 8th Generation 236L TLC V-NAND and Samsung's Piccolo controller. The Piccolo controller is manufactured at 5nm has a native PCIe Gen 5 interface and supports the NVMe 2 protocol. The controller will operate at either PCIe Gen 4 x 4 or PCIe Gen 5 x 2, to optimize power consumption, but maintain similar performance levels (PCIe Gen 4 offers 2X the bandwidth of Gen 4). This is an important consideration that makes the 990 EVO Plus well suited to low-power mobile applications. The drives are also one-sided, with no components on the bottom of the PCB. These drives do not feature a DRAM cache.

Specific details are scarce on the controller, but Samsung claims it enables enhanced performance and has improved thermal characteristics over previous-gen offerings, thanks in part to a nickel coating on the controller itself that helps to better dissipate heat and minimize thermal throttling. Samsung’s DTG (Dynamic Thermal Guard) algorithm is also incorporated into the firmware to help the 990 EVO Plus better manage long sequential transfers without throttling due to thermal saturation. The Samsung Piccolo controller supports all of the features you’d expect from a current SSD, like TRIM, garbage collection, S.M.A.R.T., etc., and it supports various encryption technologies as well.

Like other EVO-series drives, the 990 EVO Plus also features TurboWrite technology. TurboWrite uses a portion of the NAND as an SLC write buffer. This results in improved write performance as long as the buffer isn’t exhausted. The TurboWrite buffer size dynamically adjusts based on the workload; with the 2TB model, for example, the TurboWrite region can be up to 216GB (108GB on the 1TB or 432GB on the 4TB models). TurboWrite allows the DRAM-less 990 EVO Plus series to perform well in the vast majority of short and bursty consumer-class workloads.

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus series' power consumption characteristics also vary based on capacity, but idle power should be around 60mW, L1.2 mode around 5mW, and during active reads and writes, power falls within the 4.2W – 5.5W range, with the highest capacity drives obviously consuming more power. Those numbers workout to about a 16% reduction in power vs. the 990 EVO.

Samsung warranties the 990 EVO Plus series drives for 5 years, which is great for a consumer-class SSD. All told, the new Samsung 990 EVO Plus series is essentially an evolution of the existing EVOs that leverages Samsung's latest NAND technology and firmware optimizations.

Now, let's see how this 2TB drive performs...

Samsung SSD 990 EVO Plus Benchmarks

Under each test condition, the SSDs featured here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and Windows 11 was fully updated as well. Windows Firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing, and Focus Assist was enabled to prevent any interruptions.

In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test. All of the drives here have also been updated to their latest firmware as of press time. Where applicable, we would also typically use any proprietary NVMe drivers available from a given manufacturer. When not available, the drives used the in-box Microsoft NVMe driver included with Windows 11.

Please note, we're comparing the 990 EVO Plus to an array of drives, including Samsung's own 990 Pro and EVO, and competitive PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 drives, in an attempt to paint a clear picture where it fits in the current (and near future) SSD landscape.

HotHardware's Test System:

IOMeter Benchmarks

IOMeter is a well-respected industry standard benchmark. However, despite our results with IOMeter scaling as expected, it is debatable as to whether or not certain access patterns actually provide a valid example of real-world performance. The access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workloads, for example, or mirror the behavior of actual applications. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative throughput, latency, and bandwidth with a given storage solution. In addition, there are certain highly-strenuous workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools. 

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; a custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access. Queue depths from 1 to 16 were tested...

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus finishes just a notch ahead of the original EVO with both access patterns here, but can't keep pace with the higher-end PCIe Gen 4 drives (which feature DRAM) or the Phison E31T, mainstream Gen 4 SSD.

In terms of its average transfer speeds with both access patterns, the Samsung 990 EVO Plus finishes only slightly above the original EVO. The DRAM on the other Gen 4 drives gives them a big advantage here.

Latency with the Samsung 990 EVO Plus is also relatively high in light of the other drives we tested. We expected the Samsung 990 EVO Plus to trail considering its low-power, DRAM-less design, but the E31T is also a DRAM-less drive and looks much better in terms of latency.

SiSoft SANDRA 2022

Next, we used SiSoft SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant for some quick tests. Here, we used the File System Test and provide the results from our comparison SSDs. Read and write performance metrics, along with the overall drive score, are detailed below.

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus performed well in SANDRA's File System Benchmark. In this test, the Samsung 990 EVO Plus clearly outran the original EVO by a wide margin and overtook the Kingston Fury Renegade as well. The Samsung 990 EVO Plus nearly caught the 990 Pro as well.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5KB through 64MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus finished right about in the middle of the pack in the ATTO disk benchmark, right in-line with its rated specifications. Obviously, the Samsung 990 EVO Plus wasn't going to catch the higher-end 990 Pro or Gen 5 E31T in terms of sequential transfers, but it dusted the original EVO and hung with the other Gen 4 drives. 

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus is also right there in the mix with the other drives in terms of read and write IOPS, especially with transfer sizes exceeding 8KB.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark

Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test is interesting because it uses a mix of compressible and non-compressible data and outputs both Read and Write throughput of the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.

The compressibility of the data being transferred across the drives we tested had minimal to no impact on transfer speeds. Once again we see the Samsung 990 EVO Plus clearly outrunning the original EVO and Kingston drive, and competing well with the 990 Pro.

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