• Samsung 990 Pro SSD 1TB

  Storage capacity

  1TB

  Hardware Interface

  PCIe 4.0

  Brand

  Samsung

  Transfer rate

  7,450/6,900 MB/s read/write

  TBW

  600

  MTBF

  1.5 million hours

  Samsung's 990 Pro is truly pushing the limits of what PCIe 4.0 storage can offer. It offers the fastest transfer speeds we've seen so far for a Gen 4 drive while not costing much more than slower SSDs.

  Pros & Cons

  • Higher sequential reads and writes
  • Newer
  • Not much more expensive than 980 Pro

  • May come with dysfunctional firmware

  $120 at Amazon

• Samsung 980 Pro 1TB

  Storage capacity

  1TB

  Hardware Interface

  PCIe 4.0

  Brand

  Samsung

  Transfer rate

  7,000/5,000 MB/s read/write

  TBW

  600

  DRAM

  1GB DDR4

  The Samsung 980 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD competes with the best M.2 modules on the market for a top spot. It offers an impressive read and write speed of 7,000MB/s and over 5,000MB/s, respectively.

  Pros & Cons

  • Similar random performance
  • Cheaper

  • Worse sequential performance
  • Not significantly cheaper than 990 Pro

  $122 at Amazon

It's the end of the road for PCIe 4.0 SSDs, which debuted in 2019. The best drives are hitting the limit of what's possible with PCIe 4.0, which begs the question: how much faster is Samsung's 990 Pro than the 980 Pro, two of the best drives on the market, and which one is the best overall for laptops and desktops? For most users, thankfully, the choice won't be difficult to make.

Pricing, availability, specs

At the time of writing, the 1TB models of the 990 Pro and 980 Pro are both in the region of $120, making the 990 Pro the better buy by default since it's newer and features some improvements. It's a similar story at 2TB where the older 980 hits its capacity limit. The 990 Pro 2TB and 980 Pro 2TB are priced at $180 and $170, respectively. The 4TB 990 Pro comes in at $340. The pricing situation is also pretty similar when you look at the heatsink models of each drive, which cost around $10 more. On paper, this is more favorable for the 990 Pro with its theoretically higher performance.

• 	Samsung 990 Pro SSD 1TB	Samsung 980 Pro 1TB
  Storage capacity	1TB	1TB
  Hardware Interface	PCIe 4.0	PCIe 4.0
  Brand	Samsung	Samsung
  Transfer rate	7,450/6,900 MB/s read/write	7,000/5,000 MB/s read/write
  TBW	600	600
  DRAM	1GB DDR4	1GB DDR4

990 Pro vs. 980 Pro: Hardware differences

The 990 Pro uses Samsung's 8nm Pascal controller, a modest improvement over the 980 Pro's Elpis controller, which is also on the 8nm node. Additionally, the 990 Pro also makes use of the newer V7 TLC NAND flash, as opposed to the V6 TLC solid-state storage in the 980 Pro. The 990 Pro is essentially a faster 980 Pro using the latest technology Samsung has, but on a technical level, these aren't major differences, and you shouldn't expect the 990 Pro to be a massive upgrade over the 980 Pro.

The 990 Pro has a 4TB option, unlike the 980 Pro which tops out at 2TB. Each drive also has a variant that comes with a heatsink that's supposed to improve cooling and, by extension, performance. The heatsink on the 990 Pro is slightly improved compared to the 980 Pro's and has RGB. Whether either of these drives even requires a heatsink is debatable, as neither consumes a particularly significant amount of power. In any case, if you're buying these drives, then odds are you're putting them inside a PC that likely already comes with an SSD heatsink on at least one of the M.2 slots, so it's not exactly necessary anyway.

990 Pro vs. 980 Pro: Performance

Samsung makes some big claims on its product page for the 990 Pro: 40% and 55% faster random reads and writes, respectively, versus the 980 Pro, plus an extra 450 MB/s in sequential reads and 1,900 MB/s in sequential writes. Those random performance figures, though, are particularly crucial because this is the kind of work everyone encounters day to day, especially for more casual users. Samsung also claims the 990 Pro is 50% more efficient in sequential workloads.

However, real-life tests have shown that the 990 Pro only provides a small performance improvement over the 980 Pro and offers similar efficiency except in very sequential work, which is what we'd expect since real-world usage is different from the kind of tests Samsung and other companies use for marketing. The wider consensus among reviewers is that the 990 Pro is faster than the 980 Pro, but by a slim margin rather than the massive one Samsung advertises. In our review of the 990 Pro it didn't even significantly outperform the 970 EVO Plus in random workloads, though it did destroy it in sequential ones.

If you currently own a 980 Pro and are thinking about upgrading to the 990 Pro, don't expect to see wildly better performance in either sequential or random workloads. The 990 Pro on paper and in real workloads is a 980 Pro with some optimizations to get even more performance out of Samsung's PCIe 4.0 silicon, and that's okay.

Which one should you buy?

Considering the difference between the 1TB models (with or without heatsink) is nothing at the time of writing, the 990 Pro is the obvious choice. If you have a high-end laptop or a fast gaming laptop, you might want the 990 Pro just for its somewhat better efficiency, which will translate to better battery life. Unless the pricing situation changes, the 990 Pro is almost always going to be the better buy, despite the fact that it's not a huge improvement over the 980 Pro. The 990 Pro is just so cheap that it's not a big deal to spend a few extra dollars at most to get a little more speed. If the 980 Pro is ever closer to 70% of the price of the 990 Pro, it might be more appealing.

On the other hand, the heatsink-less 2TB model is a bit of a different story, as the 980 Pro 2TB can be found cheaper than its 990 Pro sibling. Generally speaking, the 980 Pro is slower, has one fewer capacity options, and costs about the same outside of promotions. The 990 Pro does enjoy a slightly wider advantage in random read performance at 2TB, so spending the extra money on the 990 Pro wouldn't be a waste.