Samsung has launched a hybrid gumstick SSD, the 990 EVO, which helps each PCIe gen 4 and 5.
The buyer-grade SSD EVO line began with the 840 EVO in 2013, with its SATA interface, 2.5-inch format, and TLC NAND, and progressed by means of 860 and 870 generations to the M.2 gumstick format. The 860 used 32-layer 3D V-NAND after which 64-layer, whereas the 870 EVO jumped to 128-layer NAND. After that it stepped as much as the PCIe gen 3 interface with the 960 EVO in 2016. This offered a efficiency increase and was adopted by the 970 EVO Plus.
Now Samsung has adopted a mixed PCIe gen 4/5 design however with restrictions affecting its PCIe gen 5 efficiency.
The drive comes with 1 or 2 TB capacities on a single sided M.2 2280 card. In its PCIe gen 4 guise it has 4 lanes and helps NVMe v2.0. The efficiency maxes out at 700,000/800,000 random learn/write IOPS with a 5,000 MBps sequential learn high velocity and 4,200 sequential write high velocity.
The IOPS is nothing particular with loads of different PCIe gen 4 M.2 card drives exceeding 1 million IOPS. Ditto the sequential bandwidth.
The oddity is that these efficiency figures don’t change when utilizing the PCIe gen 5 interface. That’s as a result of there are solely two gen 5 lanes. Though every gen 5 lane ought to have twice the bandwidth of a PCIe gen 4 lane, the halving of the lane depend means the general efficiency doesn’t change in any respect.
This does imply the drive may very well be utilized in a gen 4 PCIe laptop computer now and in a gen 5 mannequin later. That could be handy for some however the drive’s efficiency is lackluster in contrast with different PCIe gen 5 M.2 SSDs. For instance, Seagate’s FireCuda 540, with the identical capability ranges, affords 1.5 million random learn and write IOPS, and 10,000 MBps for each sequential reads and writes. Crucially, it has 4 gen 5 PCIe lanes, not simply two.
Shifting away from uncooked efficiency, we be aware that the 990 EVO makes use of its host’s DRAM as a buffer and has an onboard SLC cache for quicker knowledge IO – simply in addition to with out that its efficiency can be even worse. Samsung says the 990 EVO has quicker efficiency than the 970 EVO and, contemplating the PCIe bus degree bounce, so it ought to. Nonetheless, view this 990 EVO as a PCIe gen 4-class drive that masquerades as a gen 5 PCIe drive as a result of, in our opinion, it doesn’t ship on the usual’s potential.
Samsung says it makes use of TLC flash however doesn’t reveal the drive’s layer depend. Tech PowerUp reckons it’s a boosted gen 6 V-NAND with 133 layers as an alternative of the usual 128.
The 990 EVO has a Samsung controller and a 0.3 drive writes per day endurance for its five-year guarantee, which means 600 complete terabytes written for the 1 TB mannequin and 1,200 complete terabytes written for the two TB model. It helps 256-bit AES and TCG/Opal v2.0 encryption. The drive prices $124.99 for 1 TB and $209.99 for two TB.
