Samsung Targets Gamers With 3 Extremely Fast 990 Pro NVMe SSDs

Nelly · 5 Sep 2022 at 18:58

PC Gamer | Posted: 24 August 2022 said:
Samsung is pushing the limits of the PCIe 4.0 interface with the launch of its latest 990 Pro NVMe SSDs.
The M.2 SSDs are capable of 7,450MB/s sequential read speeds and 6,900MB/s writes, with Samsung claiming this is the "the highest speed currently available from the PCIe 4.0 interface." As the theoretical limit for read speeds over PCIe 4.0 is 8,000MB/s, it seems unlikely anyone will be able top the 990 Pro assuming it does achieve such speeds in real-world testing.

The target market for these new drives is gamers and creative pros. KyuYoung Lee, Vice President of the Memory Brand Product Biz Team at Samsung Electronics said, "The 990 Pro provides an optimal balance of speed, power efficiency and reliability, making it an ideal choice for avid gamers and creative professionals seeking uninterrupted work and play."

Gaining access to these speedy SSDs is going to require some patience, though. Samsung intends to make 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models of the 990 Pro available, but not immediately. In October, the $179 1TB and $309 2TB versions will become available, while the 4TB version doesn't have a price yet and won't be available until some point next year.

All three drives include a five-year warranty, 256-bit AES full-drive encryption, and Samsung Magician software when used in a PC. The promised write durability varies based on the size of the drive, with Samsung rating the 1TB drive at 600TB, the 2TB drive at 1,200TB, and the 4TB at 2,400TB. They are all suitable for installing in a PS5 to act as additional storage, and a heatsink version will be made available for better thermal management.

Source: https://uk.pcmag.com/ssds/142248/samsung-targets-gamers-with-3-extremely-fast-990-pro-nvme-ssds
Samsung Official Link: https://news.samsung.com/global/sam...ptimized-for-gaming-and-creative-applications

nlel1975 · 5 Sep 2022 at 19:38

My Windows 11 PC boots in about 6 seconds already with my Corsair MP510 NVMe drive, I wonder how much faster it will be with these new drives. Could we see almost instantaneously booting soon?

eddiew · 7 Sep 2022 at 23:09

Those are very fast, and the 5 year warranty is reassuring - I'd want that on a drive that will cost "quite a lot"(TM)

Although anecdotally, most of my games/programs don't feel much different on my 3000 mb/s m.2 vs my 500 mb/s sata. My hunch has been that they just can't unpack the data and make it useable in memory as fast as the drive can feed it - although perhaps that will change with a faster CPU? Still, makes me wonder how many people will shove one of these superfast drives into their PC and get no difference at all

Tetras · 7 Sep 2022 at 23:26

eddiew said:
Those are very fast, and the 5 year warranty is reassuring - I'd want that on a drive that will cost "quite a lot"(TM)

Although anecdotally, most of my games/programs don't feel much different on my 3000 mb/s m.2 vs my 500 mb/s sata. My hunch has been that they just can't unpack the data and make it useable in memory as fast as the drive can feed it - although perhaps that will change with a faster CPU? Still, makes me wonder how many people will shove one of these superfast drives into their PC and get no difference at all

It would be nice to know exactly what the bottleneck is, like if it's the CPU, the game programming, Windows subsystems? There are a few games that do show some substantial improvements, but they're very thin on the ground right now. It could be that when they're designed to take advantage of next-gen consoles SSDs, we'll actually start seeing a benefit, but idk.

opethdisciple · 10 Sep 2022 at 14:50

The reason why they have been refreshing these SSDs I believe is because Direct Storage is soon to become a thing.

I will be upgrading my 500Gb 870 Evo to a 990 Pro 1Tb or the WD 850x 1Tb but only when Microsoft tell us what the minimum requirements are for Direct Storage.

Am I right in still thinking that at a minimum we need a 1Tb SSD? I'm pretty sure at one point that was a minimum requirement.

Tetras · 10 Sep 2022 at 16:48

opethdisciple said:
The reason why they have been refreshing these SSDs I believe is because Direct Storage is soon to become a thing.

I will be upgrading my 500Gb 870 Evo to a 990 Pro 1Tb or the WD 850x 1Tb but only when Microsoft tell us what the minimum requirements are for Direct Storage.

Am I right in still thinking that at a minimum we need a 1Tb SSD? I'm pretty sure at one point that was a minimum requirement.

Yeah it was, when it was released, 1TB was the minimum, but it was silently dropped. I believe they were specifically asked if PCI-E 3.0 drives would be compatible and the answer was that PCI-E 3 or 4 drives are compatible.

EsaT · 10 Sep 2022 at 18:37

opethdisciple said:
Microsoft tell us what the minimum requirements are for Direct Storage

PCIe/NVMe SSD.
+DX12 for the game.

eddiew said:
makes me wonder how many people will shove one of these superfast drives into their PC and get no difference at all

Differences will be entirely insignificant in human scale for the price differences.
Here's what level loading time differences you'll get when processing isn't the bottleneck:

Silicon Power US70 1TB Review

While it is true that the US70 may not even come close to breaking the ten cents barrier like its little brother the US70-series, it does break the 20 cents

www.realhardwarereviews.com

opethdisciple · 18 Sep 2022 at 14:13

EsaT said:
PCIe/NVMe SSD.
+DX12 for the game.

Differences will be entirely insignificant in human scale for the price differences.
Here's what level loading time differences you'll get when processing isn't the bottleneck:

Silicon Power US70 1TB Review

While it is true that the US70 may not even come close to breaking the ten cents barrier like its little brother the US70-series, it does break the 20 cents

www.realhardwarereviews.com

Even better then if I don't need to upgrade the SSD.

chroniclard · 18 Sep 2022 at 14:43

Not really that much faster than what is already out there on PCIe 4.

lsg1r · 18 Sep 2022 at 16:05

Honestly I'm more interested in random reads, iops etc than I am the headline sequential speeds these days...

I've got 2x 2TB seagate 530's with a supposed sequential read/write of 7,300/6,900 MB/s. One is on gen 4 and one gen3 and honestly I can't tell the difference even though the gen 3 is running at half speed (only sequential is actually affected), hell I'd struggle to tell the difference with my mx500 sata ssd's on the same system.

EsaT · 18 Sep 2022 at 16:44

lsg1r said:
Honestly I'm more interested in random reads, iops etc than I am the headline sequential speeds these days...

Actually it's that IOPS which means even less for home user than STR.
Pretty much all home uses have low queue depth/low thread count access pattern.

It's uses like web servers or big company's database servers where IOPS matters with hundreds or even thousands simultaneous read/write requests.

lsg1r · 18 Sep 2022 at 17:01

EsaT said:
Actually it's that IOPS which means even less for home user than STR.
Pretty much all home uses have low queue depth/low thread count access pattern.

It's uses like web servers or big company's database servers where IOPS matters with hundreds or even thousands simultaneous read/write requests.

I'm not just a home user, I work from home and while not using databases I do have things which make use of simultaneous read/writes.

Maybe I'm a bit of an outlier but I still think higher iops are more useful than increasing nvme drives to 8,000+ MB/s vs 7,300 MB/s or even 3,500 MB/s in day to day use.

Firegod · 8 Oct 2022 at 17:49

Or save the invetiable Samsung brand tax and just grab one of the Kingston Fury Renegade PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The 1TB model has 7,300MB/s seq. read and 6,000MB/s seq. write, 900,000/1,000,000 IOPS random 4k read/write, a 5 year warranty and 1PB duration. It can be had for £109 at the moment.

Or the KC3000 - which is pretty much the exact same drive as the Fury Renegade, with just slightly less 7,000MB/s seq read and 800TB duration, but for £89.99. Bargain!

IT Troll · 11 Oct 2022 at 13:05

Samsung seem to be clearing out stocks of the 980 Pro to make way for the slightly faster 990 Pro. With the cashback deal they have on, 1TB is £79 and 2TB is £142 from selected retailers. Samsung's controller also benefits from hardware encryption.

opethdisciple · 13 Oct 2022 at 23:59

On paper the 990 Pro is twice as fast as the 970 Evo. But would the speed be perceptible at all?

Rroff · 14 Oct 2022 at 00:17

opethdisciple said:
On paper the 990 Pro is twice as fast as the 970 Evo. But would the speed be perceptible at all?

Outside of specific applications I doubt it - I have a range of drives in a range of applications and even beyond the old 840 Evo SSD the gains are less and less noticeable as you move to the 970 and 980 series of NVME drives.

Though I recently changed the NAS setup I'm using with a 980 NVME acting as the front end and mechanical HDDs acting as a secondary backup to that and the difference even over 1Gb/s LAN never mind 2.5Gb over the previous 3 disc RAID is massive, even compared to using an SSD in that role - especially stuff like opening a folder over the network with lots of image thumbnails.

sityeuropa · 14 Oct 2022 at 07:34

Still takes a while to load up Adobe products or performing System Restores, even with SSD.

From the numbers the IOPS have seem to have had a bigger jump this time. So will be interesting to see.
I don't really care about the sequential read times.

IT Troll · 14 Oct 2022 at 10:43

For games using DirectStorage, PCIE 4.0 and read speeds of ~5,000 MB/s are being targeted for best experience. It will still work on older/slower NVMe drives though.

DirectStorage makes improvements to the Windows storage subsystem and allows the GPU to bypass the CPU, removing that bottleneck.

Glanza · 14 Oct 2022 at 11:05

opethdisciple said:
On paper the 990 Pro is twice as fast as the 970 Evo. But would the speed be perceptible at all?

The only time I've every 'seen and felt' the speed increase was in the Adobe suite when messing around with big files. Gaming, Windows etc no perceived difference at all.

Nelly · 14 Oct 2022 at 12:45

IT Troll said:
Samsung seem to be clearing out stocks of the 980 Pro to make way for the slightly faster 990 Pro. With the cashback deal they have on, 1TB is £79 and 2TB is £142 from selected retailers. Samsung's controller also benefits from hardware encryption.

I already had a 500GB 980 Pro, ended up purchasing the 980 Pro 2TB, decent deal.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but all other manufacturer UI's for their software look pretty amateurish compared to Samsung Magician, not that I use it much. I've had a Samsung 830 SSD running everyday for 11 years.