Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD/Solid State Drive Review

A Closer Look

The Samsung 990 Evo Plus has a strong focus on performance, but also on cost, so it doesn’t come bundled with any unnecessary bits and bobs, and the drive itself is designed to be plug-and-play ready with any M.2 2280 device, such as your laptop, PC, console, etc.

However, one nice advantage of this drive is that it is single-sided, so it’ll be compact with more devices such as the PlayStation 5, thinner systems like notebooks and some mobile PC handhelds too.

At the core of this SSD lies Samsung’s cutting-edge V-NAND 3-bit TLC (Triple-Level Cell) flash memory. This advanced technology allows for higher storage density and improved efficiency compared to previous generations, contributing to the drive’s impressive capacity, as there’s only a single 1TB memory chip on this side.

Of course, I suspect the 2TB version will have two chips on this side, while the 4TB will employ chips on both sides, so that version will not be compatible with slimmer systems, so do keep that in mind.

The The 990 EVO Plus features a proprietary Samsung in-house controller, and this will deal with everything such as the data transfers, error correction, and wear-levelling algorithms, helping keep this drive at peak efficiency.

Furthermore, the 990 EVO Plus includes an onboard LPDDR4 DRAM cache. This high-speed memory acts as a buffer for frequently accessed data, significantly improving responsiveness and reducing latency for smoother overall operation in day-to-day tasks.

It uses the PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, so it’s broadly compatible with a lot of modern systems and motherboards, and the rated speeds should use pretty much all the bandwidth of the interface too, so let’s find out how it stacks up in our benchmarks!