Samsung introduces the 990 EVO Plus SSD, 50% faster than the regular 990 EVO

In early 2024, Samsung unveiled the 990 EVO SSD, now it’s launching a Plus version that’s much faster and offers a higher capacity option for those who need more than 2TB.

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD supports PCIe 4.0 x4 and 5.0 x2 interfaces. It is built on a 5nm controller, the latest NAND technology (it uses TLC chips) and a nickel-coated heat shield. Samsung claims that this SSD is 73% more power efficient than its previous model.

But let’s talk speed – the top 4TB model offers the best random access operations in the industry, 1,050K IOPS input and 1,400K IOPS output. Sequential access can reach 7,250MB/s read and 6,300MB/s write. For comparison, the vanilla 990 EVO does 700K IOPS input and 800K IOPS output, sequential speeds are 5,000MB/s read and 4,200MB/s write. In other words, the EVO Plus is 50% faster than the regular EVO.

Note that the EVOs lack on-board DRAM (they use host RAM instead), but Samsung claims the EVO Plus’s performance “almost rivals” that of an SSD with DRAM.

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus is optimized for gaming, business, and creative tasks. It comes in three sizes: 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. Note that the lower capacity models have slightly slower random and sequential speeds, but not by much. Even the base 1TB model does 7,150MB/s and 6,300MB/s sequential read/write and 850K/1,350K IOPS random access.

The launch prices are actually lower than the price of the vanilla EVO SSD back in January. The 1TB EVO Plus costs $110, while the vanilla SSD was priced at $125 (of course, EVO prices have dropped since then). The 2TB Plus costs $185, and the 4TB costs $345.