The Samsung 990 Evo SSD was only announced back in January of this year but today you can pick up the 1TB version of it for less than half the price it was at launch. While it isn’t the speediest drive around, this is still a fantastically low price for a drive of this capacity and a great 1TB Samsung SSD deal.
While the very best SSD for gaming options these days can offer faster performance than this Samsung drive, if you’re after an affordable upgrade from an old SSD or even an even older hard drive, then this is a solid option. It offers read speeds of up to 5,000MB/s, which is 40% faster than older PCIe Gen 3 M.2 SSDs and 10x faster than any hard drive.
The Samsung 990 Evo launch was slightly controversial, as its specs claimed it to be a PCIe Gen 5 model, which should have meant ultra fast speeds of over 10,000MB/s. However, normally SSDs use four PCIe lanes to connect to a motherboard, sharing the data connection across all four. This drive, though, uses just two lanes. That means it effectively halves its possible speed, resulting in that 5,000MB/s maximum read speed.
What’s the upshot of this? Nothing so much as this isn’t as fast an SSD as other Gen 5 SSDs, but it’s still as fast as PCI Gen 4 drives and absolutely fast enough for any gaming needs. Most games don’t put that big a strain on SSDs, and any drive of this speed will make most games load as fast as they can.
Available in both 1TB and 2TB capacities, it’s only the 1TB option that’s so heavily discounted right now, with its normal price listed at $149.99 and its price today being just $69.99. That makes it among the cheapest 1TB SSDs you can buy.
As for the rest of its specs, as well as its 5,000MB/s read speed, it can hit up to 4,200MB/s write speed, with both those figures being for sequential (i.e. one large file) workloads. When it comes to lots of small read/write requests, the drive boasts an impressive 700,000 input/output operations a second (IOPs) random read speed and 800,000 IOPs write speed.
To take advantage of this excellent offer, for buyers in the US, just head on over to this link. Buyers in the UK can also get this drive at a discounted price too, with it currently boasting an 18% saving via this link.
For more on what high-end Gen 5 SSDs can do, check out our Crucial T705 review, which is a drive that can hit 14,500MB/s.