Samsung has introduced a new model in their venerable SSD series, with the new SSD 990 positioned as a “sweet spot” option for mainstream applications. It is a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive, available in capacities of 1TB and 2TB (as tested), and it is a DRAM-less design using an in-house controller and Samsung’s V-NAND. Samsung is also calling the drive their most power-efficient SSD yet.

No, this won’t be as fast as the SSD 990 PRO that we looked at way back in 2022, and it certainly can’t compete with Samsung’s PCIe 5.0 SSD 9100 PRO that we tested last year. What it can do, however, is provide sequential speeds of up to 7250 MB/s read and 6450 MB/s write (2TB model), all while drawing about 4 watts under load.

Write endurance is lower than the 990 PRO SSDs, but is still reasonable with 400 TBW (Terabytes Written) for the 1TB and 800 TBW for the 2TB version. The warranty period also shorter, with three years offered for the SSD 990 (down from five with the SSD 990 PRO).

Regardless of what one feels about the specs, this is 2026. Releasing a new SSD with lighter specs that potentially costs less to produce could possibly be good for consumers. But we will have to see where pricing ends up.

This non-pro edition of the SSD 990 is about as simple as an NVMe drive gets.

For your inspection is an M.2 drive populated with a contoller and NAND, and covered with a heatspreader sticker. We aren’t used to seeing such basic drives from Samsung, which generally sits atop the heap as fastest SSD brand most generations, but this is 2026 and we need more mainstream options.

“In a world obsessed with theoretical maximums, our new PCIe Gen 4 SSD is built for the real world. While newer standards chase benchmarks, we’ve focused on the metrics that actually matter – a perfect balance of speed, power efficiency, and value. The Samsung 990 SSD meets diverse needs by offering a ‘Sweet Spot’ – faster than legacy drives, cooler than extreme drives, and priced for mainstream adoption.”

We begin with CrystalDiskMark, with a look at results from the empty drive and then again after conditioning the drive by filling with random files to 50% capacity:

Empty drive (left) vs. 50% drive (right)

The empty drive exceeds Samsung’s advertised sequential read speeds, though it trails in sequential write performance at these settings (their 6450 MB/s rating is probably achieved at a higher queue depth). Write speeds really suffered in this test after conditioning the drive, though the more “real-world” results from the PCMark test will show less of an impact.

Moving on to more nuanced CrystalDiskMark results after conditioning the drive, we look at our usual charts with results broken into sequential and random speeds by queue depths from 1 to 8:

I did not have recent benchmarks from appropriately “mainstream” SSDs to compare the SSD 990 against, but we can use the older Platinum P41 as a reference here. Lower queue depths are not the SSD 990’s strength in the sequential read test, though it does perform well at QD4 and above.

Write speeds are okay, but I was never able to get to the advertised speeds at QD8 and below.

Next we look at random 4K results:

A bright spot of these random 4K results are the QD4 and QD8 write speeds, which are much closer to the more recent high-end offerings than I expected.

Next, the PCMark SSD benchmark:

This is a pretty good result, particularly compared to the Platinum P41. Ultimately, the drive suffers from a lack of DRAM compared to the higher-end drives on the chart, but it manages to acquit itself quite well in this strenuous full drive benchmark. I think the SSD 990 attains the solid mainstream status it aims for, but value will be the defining characteristic.

The product was provided by Samsung for the purpose of this review.

Samsung had no control over the content of the review and was not consulted prior to publication.

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