With AMD recently joining the PCI Express 5.0 party with its Ryzen 7000 CPU (open in new tab), one might have thought that Samsung would also announce its first 5th generation M.2 drive to support it. However, that is not the case. The new Samsung 990 Pro remains a 4th generation SSD.

Considering the current situation carefully, a revised 4th generation drive at least makes sense. For starters, while PCIe Gen 5-compatible PC platforms from both Intel and AMD are now available for purchase, the number of such systems is still small. And of course, neither of the M.2-compatible gaming consoles support PCIe 5.0.

At the same time, the existing Samsung 980 Pro (open in new tab) has long since lost its status as a standard-setter for Gen 4 drives. Numerous brands of drives now outperform the 980 Pro. In other words, it's time for Samsung to regain its traditional dominance in the SSD market.

On paper, the new 990 Pro certainly appears to have closed the gap with the newer, faster drives that have been outpacing the 980 Pro since its launch two years ago. At its core is Samsung's new in-house controller known as Pascal. Samsung has not released a great deal of information about this new chip, but has revealed that Pascal will be manufactured on Samsung's 8nm process node and will offer lower power consumption and reduced latency. Samsung explains that a new nickel coating on the chip package and improved thermal control software have improved the power efficiency of the new controller by up to 50%.

Combined with Samsung's latest 7th generation 3D V-NAND flash memory, the result is a decent improvement in all claimed performance metrics. IOPS performance has also improved, increasing from 1M to 1.2M reads and from 1M to 1.55M writes. M for reads and 1M to 1.55M for writes.

SSD performance numbers do not always match real-world experience. However, various drives with the latest Phison controllers, such as the SK Hynix Platinum P41 and the Seagate Firecuda 530 2TB (open in new tab), are competing with the 990 Pro on even terms. These late-model PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives are approaching the practical limits of the Gen 4.0 protocol in terms of peak throughput.

For more information, this 2TB drive has 2GB of LPDDR4 cache memory and Samsung rates its write endurance at 1,200TB. In addition, Samsung says the 990 Pro is optimized for Microsoft's DirectStorage API (opens in new tab), which speeds up game loads.

So how does this new drive perform in practice? In a pre-benchmark drive fill routine, the 990 Pro maintained peak performance at approximately 230GB of data transfer, consistent with Samsung's claim of the amount of capacity available in fast SLC mode when the drive is empty. Needless to say, this figure drops when the drive is full. It is also slightly lower than most competing 2TB M.2 drives (which tend to offer 300GB of SLC cache). Subsequently, there are few signs of thermal throttling; on the 980 Pro, throttling was not much of an issue.

What we did notice, however, was inconsistent write performance in the ATTO benchmarks immediately after the pre-test regime; the 980 Pro settled down after being left idle for an hour. As a general rule, however, modern premium drives absorb pre-benchmark routines better than the Samsung 980 Pro.

Still, in terms of peak throughput, this SSD definitely delivered, posting 7,462 MB/sec read and 6,877 MB/sec write. This is good for a Gen 4 drive. Less impressive was the single queue depth 4K random access performance. With 80 MB/sec read and 231 MB/sec write, the performance is certainly not bad. However, it is not as much of a step up as we had hoped for in terms of IOPS throughput, as Samsung claims.

On the other hand, its 3,645 points in PCMark 10 storage is very impressive compared to other drives tested on the same AMD platform with the 8-core 3800X CPU. Most, if not all, of the competitors are in the 3,000-point range. And although this number is for the 1TB model, it is well above the 2,700 points earned by the former Samsung 980 Pro. Just note that CPU and broader platform performance can affect the overall PCMark storage results. Therefore, these results cannot be compared to PCMark storage scores for other drives on the web.

In any case, the new 990 Pro is not bad when it comes to heat, with a maximum temperature of 59°C (59°F). However, in our tests, the older 980 Pro only reached 53°C. The new drive does not operate at lower temperatures under heavy load, but it does perform much better and does not run at temperatures high enough to be a concern. As we mentioned, there is no sign of thermal throttling at all.

All of this means that the new 990 Pro is one of the fastest PCIe Gen 4 drives you can buy, putting Samsung back where it belongs. Is this the fastest? Is it faster than, say, the Kingston Fury Renegade (opens in new tab)? It is not clear. But it is not obviously slower either. In short, we seem to have hit a wall with 4th generation SSDs. Perhaps we will need a 5th generation drive to really run games with PC storage performance.