Samsung 990 PRO 4TB is coming soon

The Samsung 990 PRO ranks as one of the preeminent SSDs in terms of performance. Introduced last year, it was initially available in 1TB and 2TB variants. Samsung had, at the time, hinted at the prospect of a 4TB edition, and recently announced the imminent launch of the 990 PRO 4TB.

Though at the time of its debut, the PCI-E 4.0 was no longer the pinnacle of interfaces on consumer-grade platforms—with motherboards boasting the PCI-E 5.0 M.2 socket already in existence—its prevalence wasn’t particularly widespread. Hence, the 990 PRO retained its commitment to the PCI-E 4.0 interface. Samsung had already ventured into the realm of enterprise-grade PCI-E 5.0 SSDs but appeared unhurried in bringing this technology to consumer platforms.

Specifications for the 990 PRO 4TB had discreetly surfaced in product manuals earlier. Its performance mirrors that of its 2TB counterpart. This SSD utilizes Samsung’s avant-garde Pascal controller, coupled with the seventh-generation 176-layer 3D V-NAND. It is equipped with 4GB LPDDR4 DRAM, delivering sequential read speeds of 7450MB/s and write speeds of 6900MB/s, alongside random read and write IOPS of 1200K and 1550K respectively. With an endurance rating of 2400TBW and a 5-year warranty, it will be available both as a bare drive and with a heat sink.

The Samsung 990 PRO 4TB stands out as an impressive high-capacity, high-performance SSD. While its sequential standalone performance, constrained by the PCI-E 4.0 interface, might not rival that of SSDs utilizing the E26 approach with PCI-E 5.0, it still commands a considerable advantage in random performance. Particularly noteworthy is its superior low QD random read performance, surpassing SSDs based on the E26 blueprint.

The exact launch date for the Samsung 990 PRO 4TB remains cloaked in uncertainty.