I really want to be to give this SSD a higher rating, but the performance issues are really frustrating. As far as the good, having this as my OS drive makes the boot time very fast. I do some light design work from time to time and when a concept pops into mind, it's great to just start laying things out. I also appreciate the included heat sink and LED, especially since the LED doubles as a drive activity light. However, that leads me to the bad. Running my OS off this drive, I get crashes with no warning whatsoever. That's particularly frustrating if I'm gaming or have unsaved work. The next complication is that the drive won't re-initialize after a simple press of the restart button on my tower. I need to press and hold the power button to be able to start the machine from "cold iron". Then and only then will it boot back into Windows. Now I will note, I titled this review as undiagnosed stability issues for a reason. I don't have a separate machine to test drive reliability on, and I don't have an extra SSD and Windows license to test for possible motherboard issues. I've built numerous PCs over the years though, and when SSDs start acting up, the behaviors can often be patterned. I don't need to pull it out and start over, but I'm not convinced continued use will improve matters.

When I bought my PlayStation 5, it was pretty clear it would need an additional SSD for storage. 2TB seemed like the best balance between capacity and cost. After doing some research, I narrowed it down to the Samsung 990 Pro and the Western Digital SN850X/SN850P Black, due to a combination of performance and brand recognition/reliability.

The Western Digital was at the top of my list, because the SN850P is the officially licensed model and was said to have a heatsink specially designed for the PS5. It was slightly more expensive and slightly lower specs. The SN850X is essentially the same but not licensed for a little less money. The Samsung 990 Pro was my eventual pick, because it seemingly outperformed the WD drives across multiple testing outlets, and it was actually slightly cheaper than the licensed model.

The 990 Pro did not disappoint! Zero issues after about a year of use. It is blazing fast! On the new PS5 Pro, the internal console storage took about 5 minutes to copy 600GB of data, whereas the 990 Pro did it in about 30 seconds. Insane! This drive will be relevant for gaming for at least the next few years. Buy with confidence!

Bought 990 PRO 4tb w/ Heatsink in June 2024 and have been using it for over a month in Dell Alienware R16 running Win 11 (replacing / upgrading the 1tb stock drive). Learned about 3 significant issues online related to this drive: bad firmware, drive disappearing from Windows and Bios, and drive degradation issues - so first thing was to download the Magician software to update firmware and drivers. Despite that, I kept experiencing drive disappearance issues randomly but frequently during first few weeks. Recently changed setting to "Full Performance Mode" at all times to see if the disappearance issues would stop. This has been a disappointment. In addition, ran multiple Performance Benchmarks in Magician and never gotten close to the advertised read and write speeds up to 7450/6900 MB/s. Only getting about 6700/5700 MB/s in "Full Performance Mode" (a little higher using CrystalDiskMark but still falling short of the advertised speeds). So performance is yet another disappointment.

The 990 Pro extends Samsung’s leadership in the NVMe SSD space with a capable upgrade from the 980 Pro. This unit has a heatsink providing additional thermal dispersion to support the increased performance and throughput.

Installation was very straightforward. I used this SSD in my PC as an additional data disk rather than a boot drive. I located the available M.2 slot on my motherboard where I was planning to install the drive. After powering the PC back on I noticed the built-in LED on the heatsink which is cool addition for knowing that the drive is receiving power and functioning, though compared to other RGB elements in my setup the single segment of LED doesn’t feel like enough – if you don’t like the red color you can change the color through the Magician application (more on this later). I proceeded with setting up the drive through the Disk Management Utility in Windows 11 where I created a new partition and volume which I then mounted so that I could begin utilizing it.

SSDs are different from hard drives so firmware improvements can make a big difference to the life and the performance of the drive. So, while it’s optional, I recommend installing the Samsung Magician software to verify that the firmware is up to date as well as run some performance diagnostics. I got a really impressive 7100 MB/s read and 6754 MB/s write along with 441406 and 386230 IOPS for the read and write respectively in the Magician application with unspecified settings. I ran additional tests in CrystalDisk Mark which I've attached to this review. Especially impressive is the random reads and writes of this drive which show solid improvement over the 980 and other comparable SSDs.

For the most part I’ve been using it for photo/video storage and editing as well as storage for games. My primary boot drive that was using for media storage as well is a 1TB SSD from Micron which is a bit slower (about 34% in sequential read/writes) so needless to say I’ve noticed a considerable improvement when importing and rendering out video when utilizing the new drive especially thanks to the incredible random read/write performance.