Samsung 990 SSD arrives as an efficiency-focused, value PCIe 4.0 drive

Samsung has added a new drive to its consumer storage line-up, the Samsung 990 SSD, a PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 drive available in 1TB and 2TB capacities. Rather than chasing headline speeds, this one is pitched squarely at the sweet spot of performance, power efficiency and value — and for photographers and video editors weighing up storage for an editing rig, that balance is often more useful than raw peak numbers. You can find it on the official Samsung 990 SSD product page. Performance is respectable for a mainstream Gen4 drive. The 2TB model manages sequential reads of up to 7,250 MB/s and writes of up to 6,450 MB/s, with the 1TB version reading at up to 7,150 MB/s. Random performance runs to 850K read and 1,200K write IOPS on the 2TB, which is the sort of throughput that keeps large RAW libraries and high-resolution video timelines responsive. It won’t...