Samsung Evo 990 PLUS SSD Review: V-NAND Magic is Showing

We have reviewed our fair share of storage over the years. However, this is the first time we got to check out Samsung Foundry’s magic with their storage and in this Samsung EVO 990 Plus SSD Review, we have a good amount of areas we want to touch upon. Despite being a “DRAM-less” SSD, you are looking at a very “confident” engineering behind it, which we have not seen before.

Samsung Evo 990 PLUS SSD Review

Design and Specification

Right from the package, I must say, you are looking at a relatively simple yet straightforward package. The Samsung EVO 990 Plus SSD comes in this blue package and once you open it up, you have the following: the SSD itself and Warranty/User Guide which is a little interesting as most SSDs these days don’t include one. That aside, the moment you look at the Samsung EVO 990 Plus SSD – I must say, I was impressed.

Samsung provided us with the 2TB option for this review to happen – and unlike any other 2TB SSD we have seen before, this is the first time we noticed a single NAND flash chip on a higher capacity SSD. This 2TB SSD is the densest single NAND configuration we have ever seen. This storage is based on Samsung V-NAND TLC technology, more specifically the 8^th Generation V-NAND. The 9^th generation is only found on the 990 PRO (with and without a heatsink). Since it’s a DRAM-less SSD, the other chip you notice is the controller – which is made in-house.

As for the rest of the specification, we have listed it below:

• Model Code: MZ-V9S2T0BW(2TB)
• 2 2280 PCIe Gen 4.0×4 / 5.0 x2 NVMe 2.0
• Samsung V-NAND TLC Memory
• Read Speeds on Paper: 7250MB/s | Write Speeds on Paper: 6,300MB/s

Performance

Before we dive right into the performance review of the Samsung EVO 990 Plus SSD, there are few things to take note of. Starting off with the DRAM-less architecture, its no surprise that a DRAM SSD would perform much more faster due to the caching capabilities which happens natively on the SSD itself.

Because of this, it drives up the price by a lot – making it expensive to obtain. On the other hand, a DRAM-less SSD is still fast, however, the caching is handled differently – in this case, it uses HBM (Host Memory Buffer), which means, it uses the memory on your PC for random caching reasons. Because of that, most DRAM-less SSDs are far more affordable.

Take Note: DRAM-less SSD works best on PCs as it supports HMB. Consoles like PS5 does not support HMB, and performances might not be on par. So, PS5 users, too bad, you have to get a DRAM SSD – we will see if we can review the 990 Pro with Heatsink soon.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at the performance. For this, we benchmarked the Samsung EVO 990 Plus SSD with two of our trusty applications: CrystalDiskMark and ATTO Benchmark with the temperature and other aspects of this SSD monitored with CrystalDiskInfo. We used this SSD on a testbench which supports PCIe Gen 4 – which means, we won’t be running through any issues whatsoever.

Based off the CrystalDiskMark, it’s safe to say that the numbers Samsung advertised is as accurate it gets – with sequential reads in Q8T1 hitting 7240.98MB/s and write speeds at 6194.99MB/s – its pretty good. Samsung did claim that the right speeds could hit as high as 6300MB/s – but there are some factors which could affect the SSD speeds, namely temperature. So, we benchmarked again to see if the temperature could affect the SSD speeds, and it does – with temperatures hitting about 62 degree Celsius, we noticed that the write speeds dropped to 5591.98MB/s which proves that temperature does affect the speeds.

This is true regardless of any SSD. The idle temperature of the SSD lies around 43-45 degree Celsius range, which is slightly warmer than what we have seen in the past from other SSD makers which can go as low as 37 degree Celsius. Moving on with ATTO Disk Benchmark – we saw both the Reads and Write speeds hitting the 5230MB/s and 5620MB/s respectively with the temperature hitting close to 70 degrees Celsius – once again proving that the temperature affects the speeds.

All the Samsung SSD comes with support for their Samsung Magician software, which gives you the ability to customize the SSD based off your needs – which we will talk later but we used the software to check if there’s any SSD firmware update and there was one. After the update, we redid the benchmark again to see any improvements in benchmarks. ATTO shows slight improvement with the reads hitting as high at 6760MB/s and right speeds as high as 5600MB/s which is alright. In CrystalDiskMark, we see the same speeds for read, whereas the write speeds almost touch the 6000MB/s mark.

Overall, this performance we see above from this Samsung EVO 990 Plus SSD is expected but I am genuinely impressed by the V-NAND Design, especially the single dense 2TB chip to give this performance. Truly a feat of engineering.

Samsung Magician Software

Talking about the Samsung Magician Software, which Samsung storage users are no strangers to – provide the best experience with their easy and straightforward UI and UX. The Driver Dashboard gives you a quick overview of the situation with the SSD, Drive details gives you the detail you need and even indicates the HMB usage which is a nice way to know that it’s working, Performance Benchmark, Diagnostic Scan, Over Provisioning and my personal favourite: Performance Optimisation.

SSDs controller helps with the performance and longevity of a drive’s life span and by default, it’s programmed in Standard Mode – which allows TRIM Status and disables Full Power and Over Provisioning. Standard is more than enough for many users but if you need the performance, then you can always toggle it or go with Custom Mode for your own flavour.

This is a well-made application and more SSD makers or Storage Makers could learn and thing or two from this.

Conclusion

Despite being a DRAM-less SSD, the Samsung EVO 990 Plus SSD sure did awe me with it’s design more than the performance. But because of that very design and engineering that this SSD has gone through, the price of this SSD isn’t really “affordable”. At the time of writing (18^th Feb 2025), the 2TB EVO 990 Plus SSD is priced anywhere from RM 850 – 989, making it a very expensive DRAM-less SSD. The 1TB goes anywhere from RM 500-600 and 4TB is in the range of RM 1300-1500.

So, if you really want the ultimate PCIe Gen 4 performance and potentially the support for PCIe Gen 5×2 – which is still in its infancy stage – this SSD is worth keeping an eye on.

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