Review Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD review: The real EVO drive is here

[Admin]

The 990 EVO Plus is Samsung’s real answer to the DRAM-less SSD market, an improvement over the stalled 990 EVO in every way. The company is back to form with a pretty solid drive.

Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD review: The real EVO drive is here : Read more

 

[derekullo]

I miss Optane!
Bring back those solid read and write lines!

 

[Amdlova]

@derekullo try some enterprise ssd. Not fast than a optane but it's fast as he'll. The abblecon adpter work u.3 drivers at 44usd price tag

 

[gg83]

I love watching storage technology progress. 2tb on one little package is so awesome! And it's TLC. Could QLC achieve higher density? Like 3tb per package?

 

[helper800]

I love watching storage technology progress. 2tb on one little package is so awesome! And it's TLC. Could QLC achieve higher density? Like 3tb per package?

We have been able to get 8tb on a consumer NVMe drive for over 2 years already.

 

[thestryker]

Enterprise drives, even used ones, are definitely the best NAND for sustained throughput though they tend to use more power especially idle. For most client usage the "SLC" cache is going to be plenty, especially once you hit 2TB and greater drive size. NAND drives, even SCM ones, will never be able to match Optane in low queue depth operation though.

Short rant: if the 2.5" format had stayed we'd already have 16TB client drives and I wouldn't be surprised if every tier was one higher in capacity than it is with M.2.

On review topic: These drives really make me wish motherboard manufacturers would put in some two lane M.2 slots. While this wouldn't be cost effective for CPU lanes (unless AMD and Intel started going down to x2 bifurcation on client) it should certainly be possible for chipset. If they split a pair of the typical four lane M.2 you'd now have the ability to use 4 drives and as long as they were PCIe 4.0 drives run them at PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth. On Z890 for example that would mean 1x PCIe 5.0 x4, 2x PCIe 4.0 x4 and 4x PCIe 4.0 x2 without sacrificing anything. I think most client users would take that tradeoff.

 

[Maxxify]

I love watching storage technology progress. 2tb on one little package is so awesome! And it's TLC. Could QLC achieve higher density? Like 3tb per package?

We've had 1.33Tb QLC dies for a while now, technically, which would be up to 2.66TiB per package, but it's not really used that way often. In enterprise it is because Intel's "QLC" was taped out as 5-bit PLC at 1.66Tb per die (3.33TiB package). In QLC mode it's 1.33Tb dies, in TLC 1Tb dies. Right now there are 2Tb QLC dies on roadmaps which would be up to 4TiB packages.

 

[Maxxify]

On review topic: These drives really make me wish motherboard manufacturers would put in some two lane M.2 slots. While this wouldn't be cost effective for CPU lanes (unless AMD and Intel started going down to x2 bifurcation on client) it should certainly be possible for chipset. If they split a pair of the typical four lane M.2 you'd now have the ability to use 4 drives and as long as they were PCIe 4.0 drives run them at PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth. On Z890 for example that would mean 1x PCIe 5.0 x4, 2x PCIe 4.0 x4 and 4x PCIe 4.0 x2 without sacrificing anything. I think most client users would take that tradeoff.

We did have x2 M.2 slots in the past on some boards and quite a few laptops. I've also seen x1/x1/x1/x1 bifurcation for SSDs over the PCH (ASRock board) as the southbridge is a PCIe switch in its own right. I think x2 might be a thing for some laptops with PCIe 5.0 and there are some AICs with x2 M.2 slots, which seems the be the areas Samsung was suggesting. Don't know how much of that we'll see, though... (ASRock's setting requires UEFI support and it's technically possible to mod some UEFI for bifurcation, but basically this is up to board makers)

 

[Mama Changa]

Colour me underwhelmed. It's actually pathetic to see the sustained write performance of the 990 Evo Plus is still lower than the now many years old 970 Evo Plus which sustains ~ 1900Mb/s. It should not even be close let alone slower and the 970 is PCI-E 3.0, showing that the last 4 years of ssd development have been largely a joke and don't get me started on PCI-E 5.0 garbage.

 

[Maxxify]

Colour me underwhelmed. It's actually pathetic to see the sustained write performance of the 990 Evo Plus is still lower than the now many years old 970 Evo Plus which sustains ~ 1900Mb/s. It should not even be close let alone slower and the 970 is PCI-E 3.0, showing that the last 4 years of ssd development have been largely a joke and don't get me started on PCI-E 5.0 garbage.

The 970 EVO Plus has twice the channels and a much smaller cache. Speed wise, I think we went from the two-plane V5/92L (~500µs tPROG) to four-plane V8/236L which at its rated ISSCC speed of 164 MB/s should be in the 390µs range. So, yeah, about 25% faster if it had the same size cache, but Samsung specifically pushed the 990 EVO Plus with the 990 PRO's cache size which is much larger than even the 990 EVO's. With such a large cache if you want to avoid folding, which has been a Samsung staple, you might opt to lower the effective TLC write speed (not the only reason, but one). I think the Rocket 5 is an example of a drive that pushes for the highest TLC speed possible (but is also 8-channel) and it clearly shows that current hexaplane flash can be very fast. (sadly, the T500 is not the best example of sustained performance)

 

[Geef]

For it's current price it would be a better idea to just wait for another Prime day deal and pick up a 990 Pro.

 

[das_stig]

Manufacturers are milking the prices and keeping sizes low, no excuse for Samsung to double+ the price from 2TB-4TB, when the jump from 1TB-2TB was less than half, the tech used is basically the same.
I used to always say go Samsung, now I say go value, as the difference is so small.

 

[Loadedaxe]

Color me ...meh. If they were in line with other competing SSDs at $69 then maybe.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

If you want cheap… dram less drives make sense, cut the features cut the cost.
It’s only a couple of years since the YouTube press was advising everyone to avoid dram less.

The sad thing to me is that as process nodes have shrunk and yields per wafer increase that we have all but lost 2 bit MLC. SLC was always going to be too expensive for the mass market. MLC and TLC formed a good middle ground, both commodity grade and effective. QLC gives greater density, less cost but would seem to me to be better for archiving (periodic refreshes not withstanding).

Please Samsung give us a SSD with DRAM, 4 channel PCIe links, MLC (2 bit) with current capacities and the same warranty of my old 850pro. (After 10 years it has just expired)

 

[newtechldtech]

I miss Optane!
Bring back those solid read and write lines!

You can still buy optane 58xxx today.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I love watching storage technology progress. 2tb on one little package is so awesome! And it's TLC. Could QLC achieve higher density? Like 3tb per package?

With this V8 V-NAND, Samsung was able to pack 2TB of TLC into a single package with 16 dies. So that's basically ~683GiB of raw NAND capacity (for SLC mode), which would be ~2730 GiB in QLC mode.

What's more impressive to me is 2TB in a single package means that, potentially, you could do four packages per side on an M.2 drive. 8TB of TLC on a single-sided 2280 SSD is now possible in theory, or 16GB with a double-sided solution. How long until we see such consumer drives? That's the real question.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

With this V8 V-NAND, Samsung was able to pack 2TB of TLC into a single package with 16 dies. So that's basically ~683GiB of raw NAND capacity (for SLC mode), which would be ~2730 GiB in QLC mode.

What's more impressive to me is 2TB in a single package means that, potentially, you could do four packages per side on an M.2 drive. 8TB of TLC on a single-sided 2280 SSD is now possible in theory, or 16GB with a double-sided solution. How long until we see such consumer drives? That's the real question.

Not soon enough

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Not soon enough

Yeah. I've been using 2TB or larger SSDs for at least four years now. But while 4TB dropped to around $200~$250 a year ago (for good drives), now most of those drives are sitting at $300+ again. The collusion in the NAND industry did its job! I'd love to see 4TB become standard, with 8TB for people like me. I don't need 16TB, yet, but that day will come... I remember when a 256GB SSD seemed "huge," LOL.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

First hard drive I had was on a 286, dell 200. Motherboard was huge, it needed to be, the logic was all discrete chips. There was none of this consolidated stuff. HDD was huge, physically, storage wise it was 20MB.

 

[gg83]

With this V8 V-NAND, Samsung was able to pack 2TB of TLC into a single package with 16 dies. So that's basically ~683GiB of raw NAND capacity (for SLC mode), which would be ~2730 GiB in QLC mode.

What's more impressive to me is 2TB in a single package means that, potentially, you could do four packages per side on an M.2 drive. 8TB of TLC on a single-sided 2280 SSD is now possible in theory, or 16GB with a double-sided solution. How long until we see such consumer drives? That's the real question.

Thanks as always Jarred! I really appreciate your insight.

 

[gg83]

We have been able to get 8tb on a consumer NVMe drive for over 2 years already.

8tb on a single side of top teir tlc?

 

[gg83]

We've had 1.33Tb QLC dies for a while now, technically, which would be up to 2.66TiB per package, but it's not really used that way often. In enterprise it is because Intel's "QLC" was taped out as 5-bit PLC at 1.66Tb per die (3.33TiB package). In QLC mode it's 1.33Tb dies, in TLC 1Tb dies. Right now there are 2Tb QLC dies on roadmaps which would be up to 4TiB packages.

So 2tb tlc is an achievement? Or not so much?

 

[Maxxify]

So 2tb tlc is an achievement? Or not so much?

There's a difference between 2Tb TLC dies and 2TB TLC packages. Currently you can stack up to 16 dies in a package which, since there are 8 bits in a byte, means you can reach 2TB in one package with just 1Tb dies. That's the case here and 1Tb dies for TLC are fairly common these days. As it stands, larger dies and in particular 2Tb dies are largely relegated to QLC on roadmaps. The exceptions would be BiCS10 TLC and the X5 generation of YMTC flash.

However, to approach your question differently and assume you mean a single 2TB package of TLC, this is an achievement of sorts. Samsung is particularly good at making flash and flash packages and being able to achieve this level of performance with a single package is pretty neat. When you have a package with this many dies, you need to have good dies and good chips in-between (F-Chip) because of signal integrity issues and the need for multiple I/O channels. Maintaining this at a high I/O rate is particularly challenging and that's necessary here since it's a four-channel controller that needs to hit 7+ GB/s. (the 4TB T500, if you look at it, uses DDR muxes)

 

[Scour]

I don´t think the 990 EVO Plus is that bad.

I think the price is to bad for it´s performance

Currently in Germany the 2TB costs 185€, the 990 Pro 147€. Bad some days ago the Plus costs 206€, so the price already decrease

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I don´t think the 990 EVO Plus is that bad.

I think the price is to bad for it´s performance

Currently in Germany the 2TB costs 185€, the 990 Pro 147€. Bad some days ago the Plus costs 206€, so the price already decrease

I think the 990 Evo Plus looks good overall, and price is the only thing that needs to correct. This is probably just a "new and early adopter tax" that will go away over time. There's literally zero reason for 990 Evo Plus to cost more than the 990 Pro, and over time we can expect it to be $10~$25 cheaper at 2TB. That's what it should be at any rate.