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

The drive was rated at 7150 MB/s read and 6300 MB/s write, and of course, they’re perfect world, up to and including type figures, but at 7098 and 6042 I think we’re reasonably close to that, and the performance holds up to what I’d expect at this price range.

The IOPS are looking good though, with the RND4K being right around the 250K+ we would expect to see.

For copying the 64MB workload, the drive took just 252ms, getting up to a transfer speed of 254.191 MB/s, which is pretty decent for a bunch of tiny files.

But moving up to our 6 files totalling 50GB, the drive was able to accelerate much higher to 3289.831 MB/s and completed the transfer in around 15.5 seconds.

This can be seen more clearly in the ATTO benchmark though, with the drive getting up to full read speeds from around 512KB blocks and full write from around 128 KB blocks.

In Anvil, the drive response times are looking excellent, but given this drive is using up nearly all of what PCIe 4.0 has to offer, and features one of Samsungs own rather excellent controllers, that’s hardly surprising.

AS SSD always gives us scores lower than CrystalDiskMark, however, this is still a very good score for a Gen4 M.2 SSD, and again, we see consistently low access times.

loading times of a typical ISO, program or game are all extremely quick too, with sub-1-second scores in this benchmark.

The consistently strong read and write scores result in an AS SSD score of 10036, firmly putting this into the mid-to-high-end category.

For the compression test, the drive is a little all over the place, with a consistent read speed, but the write speeds are up and down constantly, at least it does get back up to full speed very quickly, so it’s likely just butting heads with the influx of compression data. Still though, it’s not a flagship drive, so overall, I think this is alright.

For recording uncompressed 4K HDR video, we didn’t run into any troubles, and the Samsung 990 EVO should be able to more than keep up with multiple streams if you’re using this drive for content creation.

For gaming, the Final Fantasy benchmark rated the drive “Extremely High” with total loading times coming in at just over 10 seconds in total, which is very fast.

We see very good loading, recording, install, save and moving speeds throughout the gaming storage benchmarks, and again, excellent average access times, giving it a score of 2697 in total.

Cooling clearly isn’t an issue either, the drive ran consistently cool throughout all of the testing, never exceeding 49c, so it’s extremely unlikely that thermal throttling will ever be an issue.