In the SSD space, Samsung is a household name that delivers top-notch quality, with its 990 PRO series being no exception. At $300 off on Amazon, the 4TB version of the company’s PCIe NVMe Gen 4 SSD is one of the best deals you’ll come across if you want to treat your system to a performance and storage upgrade, so why not secure a purchase for $799.99? The 990 PRO is up to 55 percent faster in random read and write performance compared to older-generation SSDs Thanks to the newer PCIe NVMe Gen 4 standard, the 4TB 990 PRO can […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/samsung-990-pro-4tb-nvme-ssd-discount-amazon/

Up bright and early this morning to put the finishing touches on what has been a whirlwind of SSD reviews over the past few weeks. In less than 48 hours, I’ll be setting the keyboard aside for a month as I embark on a coast-to-coast-to-coast motorcycle journey across North America in under three weeks, Atlantic …

The post SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 Gen5 8TB SSD Review – This 8TB Beast Includes Industry Leading 14GB/s Gen5 Speeds & a 5-Year Warranty appeared first on The SSD Review.

To relieve some of the pain for buyers who’ll indulge themselves by buying a new SSD or RAM at inflated prices, Amazon has decided to make it worthwhile by putting up a certain amount of credit for specific purchases. On this occasion, Samsung’s 990 EVO Plus in the 4TB capacity can be yours for $599.99 after a 43 percent discount, but you’re also getting $100 of credit for your troubles. Samsung’s 990 EVO Plus is the SSD for the majority of users, and it is fast enough to be outfitted in a PS5 Supporting the PCIe NVMe Gen 4 standard, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/samsung-990-evo-plus-4tb-ssd-43-percent-off-on-amazon-with-100-credit/

While attending Computex in Taiwan this past June, The SSD Review had the opportunity to meet with Exascend CEO and Founder Frank Chen, who provided valuable insight into the company’s background and philosophy. Exascend is a NAND flash storage specialty manufacturer with a product portfolio that spans memory cards, DRAM, embedded storage solutions, and enterprise-class …

The post Exascend PD5 Gen5 7.68TB Enterprise SSD Review – 15GB/s Throughput with 3000K+ IOPS and Exceptional Random Writes appeared first on The SSD Review.

I absolutely love world firsts. Even more than that, I love seeing genuine technological innovation. Not long ago, we introduced the Longsys Gen4 mSSD, and we were fortunate enough to receive the drive directly from Longsys Chairman Huabo Cai, giving us the opportunity to publish what turned out to be an unexpected world exclusive. That …

The post Longsys Gen5 2TB mSSD Review – 13GB/s Speed & up to 8TB Capacity in a 25 Cent Piece Sized Storage Device appeared first on The SSD Review.

Samsung has introduced a new model in their venerable SSD series, with the new SSD 990 positioned as a "sweet spot" option for mainstream applications. It is a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive,…

When it comes to SSDs, I can’t help but wonder whether the latest price spike is simply a temporary shock driven by AI demand, or whether it was inevitable all along. For a while, we had it incredibly good. High-performance, DRAM-equipped SSDs with generous capacities and five-year warranties were selling at prices that would seem …

The post Samsung 990 QLC DRAMless Gen4 2TB SSD Review – Choosing Between This & the TLC-based 990 EVO Plus appeared first on The SSD Review.

Following on from a leak a few days ago, Samsung has now officially announced its new 990 SSD. While previously we would have expected to see a 1TB PCIe 4 based SSD to launch around the £100 to £130 mark, AI demand has sent prices skyrocketing. For a new-gen Samsung 990 (non Pro variant), you are now looking at a price tag of over £210 for 1TB, going up to over £400 for a 2TB model.

Samsung says the 2TB version can reach 7250MB/s sequential read speeds, while the 1TB model tops out at 7150MB/s. Both capacities deliver up to 6450MB/s sequential write speeds. Random performance also sees an uplift, with the 2TB model rated for 850K read and 1200K write IOPS, and the 1TB model rated for 700K read and 1100K write IOPS.

Thanks to newer NAND and other changes, Samsung says the new 990 SSD is significantly more power-efficient than the 990 Pro, but we would need to see independent testing to verify this.

The Samsung 990 SSD will be available starting this week, priced at £212.19 for the 1TB model and £411.99 for the 2TB model.

KitGuru Says: I have a slightly older Samsung 2TB PCIe 4 SSD that I got for less than the price of the new 1TB model. At this point, I'm just praying it never dies because with prices like this, I wouldn't be able to replace it.

Continue Reading

Samsung’s new 990 SSD joins the consumer lineup as a mainstream PCIe Gen4 drive that prioritizes efficiency and value over raw speed. Samsung calls it its most power-efficient SSD to date, claiming up to 38% better power efficiency than the 990 PRO. The 2TB model is rated at 7,250MB/s sequential read and 6,450MB/s write, with random I/O up to 850K IOPS read and 1,200K IOPS write. The 1TB model steps down slightly to 7,150MB/s sequential read, 700K IOPS random read, and 1,100K IOPS random write. The drive ships in 1TB and 2TB capacities at MSRPs of $269.99 and $529.99, respectively.

The name deserves a modest explanation. Samsung’s 990 family already includes the 990 PRO, 990 EVO, and 990 EVO Plus. The plain “990” now sits alongside them as an entry SSD rather than starting a new generation. It pairs a Samsung in-house controller with V-NAND (more on that later) in a DRAM-less design that relies on a Host Memory Buffer. It carries a three-year warranty, compared to the PRO’s five-year warranty, and is rated for 400TB and 800TB of writes at 1TB and 2TB capacities. Sequential read matches the 990 EVO Plus at 7,250MB/s but trails the 990 PRO’s 7,450MB/s. The 850K IOPS random read rating is well under the PRO’s 1,400K. Samsung’s pitch centers on two numbers: sequential writes are over 50% faster than the 990 EVO, and a 38% efficiency gain; 1,686MB/s per watt on 2TB reads versus 1,221MB/s per watt for the 990 PRO in Samsung’s internal testing. Buyers who prioritize outright speed already have Samsung’s Gen5 9100 PRO family, which we reviewed at launch and again in its 8TB capacity, so the 990 is not meant to compete directly with those drives.

Samsung has been down this road before. The 980, its first DRAM-less consumer NVMe drive, came through our lab in 2021 and left a poor impression. The smaller capacities, in particular, landed at the bottom of our charts, and the drive was relentlessly mocked around the lab. But the market has shifted dramatically since then. The AI buildout is soaking up NAND and DRAM supply, component pricing is climbing, and consumers are feeling the pinch across the board. In that environment, a Gen4 drive that offers solid sequential speed, low power draw, and decent capacity starts to look like a sensible choice, provided the street price cooperates.

One spec Samsung refused to provide is the NAND itself. The reviewer’s guide lists only “Samsung V-NAND.” When we asked directly, the company said it cannot disclose component details beyond official specifications, pointing us back to rated performance and its “latest Samsung V-NAND technology.” So we are left to read between the lines, which point to TLC rather than QLC. The endurance spec is the giveaway: 400TB and 800TB over a three-year warranty works out to roughly 133TB and 267TB of writes per year, essentially the same annual allowance as the 990 PRO’s 600TB and 1,200TB across five years. The likeliest answer is a lower-bin Samsung TLC V-NAND in this drive or a lower-cost, shorter-warranty option to make the drive more affordable. It’s odd that they’re being intentionally coy on what’s typically a foundational specification.

Our review unit is the 2TB model (MZ-V9V2T0), a pre-production sample running firmware 0B2QLXL7, which we put through fio, GDS, and AI model-load testing detailed below.

Samsung 990 SSD Specifications

Samsung 990 SSD Design and Build

The Samsung 990 uses the familiar M.2 2280 form factor, measuring up to 80.15 x 22.15 x 2.38mm. It has a single-sided design and launches without a dedicated heatsink option. This makes it a good physical fit for notebooks, compact PCs, and desktop motherboards with their own M.2 cooling. The overall construction is simple, with Samsung keeping the controller, NAND, and supporting circuitry on one side of the PCB.

The front label displays the Samsung 990 branding, 2TB capacity, model number, firmware, and electrical specifications. There is no integrated heat spreader, so cooling relies on system airflow and an M.2 heatsink you provide.

With the label removed, you can see Samsung’s in-house controller sitting close to the M.2 connector, with the power components packed around it. The NAND sits at the other end of the board, leaving quite a bit of unused space in the middle. Since this is a DRAM-less drive, there is no separate DRAM chip on the PCB.

The back of the drive is mostly taken up by the regulatory label, with no active components underneath. Again, because the 990 uses a single-sided layout, it should be easier to fit in thin laptops and compact systems where space around the M.2 slot can be tight.

On the software side, the 990 is managed through Samsung Magician 9.0, which covers the essentials: firmware updates, drive health and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, diagnostic scans, benchmarking, and secure erase, along with setup for the drive’s AES 256-bit encryption features. There’s nothing 990-specific to configure, since the HMB arrangement requires no user tuning. It’s worth installing at first boot to keep the firmware up to date, and Magician is generally a very capable tool that adds value.

Samsung 990 Performance

Peak Synthetic Performance

The FIO test is a flexible and powerful benchmarking tool for measuring the performance of storage devices, including SSDs and HDDs. It evaluates metrics such as bandwidth, IOPS, and latency under different workloads, like sequential and random read/write operations. This test helps to assess the peak performance of storage systems, making it useful for comparing different devices or configurations. We measured the peak burst performance for this test, limiting the workload to a 10GB footprint on both SSDs.

Peak Synthetic Performance: The Samsung 990 delivered 7,177 MB/s sequential read, 6,070 MB/s sequential write, 872K random read IOPS, and 1.08M random write IOPS, placing it near the bottom of this PCIe Gen4/Gen5 comparison group. Compared to the Samsung 990 Pro, the 990 trailed by about 4% in sequential read, but fell 15.7% behind in sequential write, 37.7% behind in random read IOPS, and 23.0% behind in random write IOPS. Against the fastest Gen5 drive, the SanDisk SN8100, the gap widened considerably, with the 990 delivering roughly 52% lower sequential read throughput, 57% lower sequential write throughput, 62% lower random read performance, and 50% lower random write performance.

Average LLM Load Time

The Average LLM Load Time test evaluated the load times of three different LLMs: DeepSeek R1 7B, Meta Llama 3.2 11B, and DeepSeek R1 32B. Each model was tested 10 times, and the average load time was calculated. This test measures the drive’s ability to load large language models (LLMs) into memory quickly. LLM load times are critical for AI-related tasks, especially for real-time inference and processing large datasets. Faster loading enables the model to process data more quickly, thereby improving AI responsiveness and reducing wait times.

Average LLM Load Time: AI model loading was the Samsung 990’s weakest test, with the drive finishing at or near the bottom across all three workloads. It recorded 5.06 seconds for DeepSeek R1 7B, 7.61 seconds for Meta Llama 3.2 11B Vision, and 7.86 seconds for DeepSeek R1 32B. Compared to the fastest drive, the SK hynix Platinum P51, the Samsung 990 took approximately 99% longer to load the 7B model, 112% longer to load the 11B Vision model, and 88% longer to load the 32B model. The more interesting result is the Samsung 990 Pro, which lands at the bottom of these charts right alongside its value sibling: the 990 edged out the Pro by about 1% on the 7B load and trailed it by 15% on the 11B Vision model and 8% on the 32B model. Whatever Samsung’s Gen4 drives give up in this workload, they give it up together, so stepping up to the Pro buys little for AI model loading.

One of the tests conducted on this testbench was the Magnum IO GPU Direct Storage (GDS) test. GDS is a feature developed by NVIDIA that allows GPUs to bypass the CPU when accessing data stored on NVMe drives or other high-speed storage devices. Instead of routing data through the CPU and system memory, GDS enables direct communication between the GPU and the storage device, significantly reducing latency and improving data throughput.

How GPU Direct Storage Works

Traditionally, when a GPU processes data stored on an NVMe drive, the data must first travel through the CPU and system memory before reaching the GPU. This process introduces bottlenecks because the CPU acts as a middleman, adding latency and consuming valuable system resources. GPU Direct Storage eliminates this inefficiency by enabling the GPU to access data directly from the storage device via the PCIe bus. This direct path reduces data-movement overhead, enabling faster, more efficient data transfers.

AI workloads, especially those involving deep learning, are highly data-intensive. Training large neural networks requires processing terabytes of data, and any delay in data transfer can lead to underutilized GPUs and longer training times. GPU Direct Storage addresses this challenge by ensuring that data is delivered to the GPU as quickly as possible, minimizing idle time and maximizing computational efficiency.

In addition, GDS is particularly beneficial for workloads that involve streaming large datasets, such as video processing, natural language processing, or real-time inference. By reducing the reliance on the CPU, GDS accelerates data movement and frees up CPU resources for other tasks, further enhancing overall system performance.

Throughput on the read side climbed steadily as thread count increased. At the 1M block size, the Samsung 990 started at 2.27 GiB/s on a single thread and peaked at 2.89 GiB/s with 64 threads, then settled to 2.79 GiB/s at 128 threads. The 128K block size followed a similar curve, increasing from 1.21 GiB/s at 1 thread to 2.12 GiB/s at 128 threads, roughly a 75% gain. The 16K block size behaved differently. It peaked at a single thread (0.82 GiB/s), dropped sharply once concurrency was introduced, and plateaued around 0.3 GiB/s from 8 threads onward. This pattern is consistent with small block I/O saturating on per-operation overhead rather than raw bandwidth.

Latency scaled as expected, rising with thread count. At 1M, average latency grew from 430 microseconds on one thread to 44.7 milliseconds on 128 threads, roughly a 100x increase, reflecting increased queue depth due to more concurrent GPUDirect Storage threads. The 128K and 16K block sizes showed the same upward trend, reaching 7.4 milliseconds and 6.2 milliseconds, respectively, at 128 threads. Notably, 16K had the lowest single-thread latency of the three (18 microseconds), reflecting its smaller per-operation payload, even though its overall throughput ceiling was the lowest.

Write throughput varied by block size. The 1M block size stood out, jumping from 0.32 GiB/s at a single thread to 3.89 GiB/s at 8 threads, its peak, before tapering slightly to 3.63 GiB/s at 128 threads as queueing overhead increased. The 128K and 16K block sizes remained flat across the thread range, hovering near 0.3 GiB/s regardless of concurrency. This suggests the write path is limited by per-I/O overhead or controller queuing rather than bandwidth at those sizes.

Latency on writes rose more steeply than on reads, particularly at 128K, which climbed from 382 microseconds at one thread to 51.0 milliseconds at 128 threads, the highest figure recorded across either write or read testing. The 1M block size showed an unusual dip, with latency dropping from 3.06 milliseconds on one thread to 1.03 milliseconds on four threads, likely because the single-thread run was not yet saturating the write path, then climbing steadily to 34.4 milliseconds on 128 threads. The 16K block size stayed the most consistent, closing the sweep at 9.1 milliseconds, the lowest ceiling of the three block sizes.

Conclusion

The Samsung 990 isn’t chasing the top of the charts, and the numbers make that clear. It trailed the 990 Pro across every FIO test we ran, from a 4% gap in sequential read to a 38% deficit in random read IOPS, and fell well behind the fastest Gen4 and Gen5 drives in this comparison group. AI model loading tells a similar story, with the 990 and 990 Pro finishing at the bottom of the field together; the 990 actually edged its Pro sibling on the DeepSeek R1 7B load while trailing by 8 to 15% on the larger models. Buyers who need peak throughput for demanding workloads should look elsewhere in Samsung’s lineup, starting with the Gen5 9100 Pro.

That said, judging the 990 against the fastest drives on the market misses the point of the drive. This is a mainstream Gen4 SSD built around efficiency and value, not benchmark supremacy, and compared to its real predecessor, the 990 EVO, it’s a solid upgrade. Sequential writes are more than 50% faster, power efficiency is up 38% by Samsung’s own numbers, and the drive still delivers sequential read speeds in line with the 990 EVO Plus. Samsung chose to stay quiet on the NAND itself, but the endurance ratings suggest a competent TLC implementation rather than a QLC design.

For buyers who don’t need Gen5 speeds or Pro-tier random I/O, and who want a dependable, power-efficient Gen4 drive at a workable price, the 990 is a sensible upgrade path from the EVO line. Notably, stepping up to the 990 Pro buys nothing for AI model loading, so the choice between the two comes down to random I/O and sustained writes rather than anything AI-related. At $269.99 for 1TB and $529.99 for 2TB, the MSRPs reflect the current memory market more than the drive’s entry positioning, so the 990’s value case will ultimately be set by street prices. It’s not the drive to buy if raw performance is the priority, but it does what it’s meant to do.

Product Page – Samsung 990

The post Samsung 990 SSD Review: A Value Gen4 SSD for Expensive Times appeared first on StorageReview.com.

Samsung has officially started mass production of its new PM1763 PCIe Gen 6 SSD, a storage solution designed for next-generation AI and high-performance computing (HPC) servers. The company says the new drive will help meet the growing demand for faster and more reliable storage as AI workloads continue to expand.

As AI models become larger and require more data, storage performance has become a key part of modern server infrastructure. Samsung developed the PM1763 PCIe Gen 6 SSD to deliver higher speeds, improved efficiency, and stronger security for enterprise customers running AI applications.

The PM1763 is built using Samsung’s 9th-generation V-NAND technology and a newly developed 4nm controller. Together, these upgrades help the drive deliver significant improvements in both speed and power efficiency.

Samsung is offering the PM1763 in 4TB, 8TB, and 16TB capacities. The flagship 16TB model delivers sequential read speeds of up to 28,400 MB/s and write speeds of up to 21,900 MB/s. According to Samsung, this is more than twice the performance of the previous PM1753 SSD.

The company also highlights the drive’s ability to handle AI workloads more efficiently. A 40GB large language model can reportedly be transferred in around 1.4 seconds, helping reduce delays between processors and AI accelerators.

For demanding data center environments, the PM1763 supports direct-to-chip cooling technology. This design helps maintain high performance during heavy workloads and long operating periods. Samsung says the new SSD also improves power efficiency by more than 1.8 times compared to its predecessor, which can help lower operating costs for data centers.

Security has also received attention. The PM1763 includes support for post-quantum cryptography algorithms, which are designed to provide protection against future quantum computing threats. It also supports TDISP security technology to help secure data movement in virtualized environments.

Samsung believes the PM1763 will play an important role in future AI infrastructure. With its combination of high performance, better efficiency, and advanced security features, the new enterprise SSD is positioned as a strong storage solution for modern AI and HPC platforms.

The Samsung PM1763 is a PCIe Gen6 NVMe SSD that the company said has entered production to support new AI servers

The post Samsung PM1763 PCIe Gen6 Enterprise SSD in Production appeared first on ServeTheHome.

Samsung has started mass production of the PM1763, its first PCIe Gen6 enterprise SSD, pairing 9th-generation V-NAND with a newly developed 4nm controller. The 15.36TB flagship is rated for sequential reads up to 28,400 MB/s and writes up to 21,000 MB/s, with reads landing at 1.96x the 14,500 MB/s ceiling of the Gen5 PM1753 it replaces. Samsung says the PM1763 has completed validation for next-generation AI platforms, and the timing aligns with the first wave of Gen6-capable servers expected in the coming year.

Why PCIe Gen6 Matters

PCIe Gen6 doubles the per-lane signaling rate to 64 GT/s using PAM4, which puts roughly 32 GB/s of bandwidth each direction on the standard x4 SSD link, up from about 16 GB/s on Gen5. Gen5 drives have been bumping against that ceiling for a while, with the fastest models rated in the 14-14.5 GB/s range the interface allows.

The PM1763’s 28.4 GB/s rating uses most of the new headroom, and for AI infrastructure the practical effect is that fewer drives are needed to saturate a GPU server’s storage path, while checkpoint and model-load operations spend less time blocking accelerators. Samsung frames it in model terms, claiming a 40GB LLM can move from drive to memory in roughly 1.4 seconds, versus about 2.7 seconds on the PM1753. That 1.4-second figure is the sequential read rating for a 40GB file, not a measured transfer, so treat it as a best-case illustration of the interface math.

Random performance scales alongside the sequential numbers. Samsung’s product materials list up to 6.8 million random read IOPS and 950,000 random write IOPS for the 16TB-class configuration; the SCADA white paper’s measured 6.92 million IOPS per drive (covered below) suggests the read figure is conservative.

Power efficiency improves up to 1.8x over the prior generation, which matters as much as the raw speed in dense deployments, since Gen6 controllers run hot and every watt saved per drive multiplies across a dense chassis. To that point, Samsung has optimized the PM1763 for liquid-cooled servers with direct-to-chip (D2C) cooling, targeting sustained peak performance under extended load rather than burst figures.

PM1763 Specifications

GPU-Driven I/O: 281 Million IOPS Across 42 Drives

Samsung has also published a white paper pairing the PM1763 with SCADA (Scaled Accelerated Data Access), the NVIDIA-developed framework that lets GPU threads submit NVMe commands directly to the drives, bypassing the CPU and kernel storage stack entirely. The argument for GPU-initiated I/O is concurrency: a CPU can keep roughly 45 million IOPS in flight across its thread pool, while a GPU dispatching from around 100,000 threads pushed past 95 million IOPS per GPU in Samsung’s testing.

The numbers come from a 512-byte random read workload on an H3 Falcon 6048 Gen6 server with one H100, two H200s, and 42 PM1763 E1.S 15.36TB drives behind three Broadcom PEX90144 Gen6 switches. A single PM1763 processed roughly 6.92 million GPU-issued IOPS, an 86% gain over the 3.72 million the Gen5 PM1753 managed in the same setup. With 14 drives per GPU, the system held near-linear scaling at about 96 million IOPS per GPU group, and the full 42-drive configuration aggregated 281 million IOPS, with per-drive results staying within 5% of the single-drive peak. We did not conduct this testing, nor did we independently audit the results, but the scaling behavior is interesting: latency consistency across drives, not peak IOPS, determined how well the aggregate held up.

What Gen6 Does for Dense Storage Servers

The question is what a shelf of these drives does inside a single box. We recently pushed the Dell PowerEdge R7725xd past 300 GB/s of local throughput with 24 Gen5 SSDs, each drive on dedicated x4 lanes from the CPU complex, and served 160 GB/s over the network with PEAK:AIO’s software keeping the queues saturated. That system rivals multi-node storage clusters from a single 2U chassis. Swap in Gen6 drives at the PM1763’s rated speeds and the same 24-bay topology carries a theoretical ceiling of roughly 681 GB/s of raw read bandwidth, though CPU lane budgets and network egress become the binding constraints well before the drives do.

Capacity density moves in tandem. PEAK:AIO’s 2U AI Data Server already packs 1.5PB using 61.44TB QLC drives while delivering 120 GB/s over RDMA. When Samsung ships the 61.44TB PM1763, that class of system gets Gen6 bandwidth and petabyte-plus density in a similar footprint (next-gen servers are likely to add a rack unit for cooling). For AI shops trying to keep GPU clusters fed without building out a parallel file system across a dozen nodes, the single-server storage argument keeps getting stronger.

Security and Availability

Samsung has also extended the drive’s security stack for multi-tenant AI environments. The PM1763 supports post-quantum cryptography algorithms ahead of anticipated quantum attacks on classical encryption, as well as TDISP (TEE Device Interface Security Protocol), which secures the data path between confidential VMs and the device in virtualized deployments.

“Built on industry-leading performance, PM1763 has successfully completed validation for next-generation AI platforms and is well positioned to support evolving AI infrastructure requirements,” said Jangseok Choi, Vice President and Head of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. “As AI models continue to grow in size and complexity, PM1763 will serve as a key solution that enables customers to efficiently scale memory capacity and optimize AI operations.”

The PM1763 is in mass production now in 4TB, 8TB, and 16TB capacities. Samsung has not announced ship dates for the larger capacity points.

Samsung PM1763 Product Page

The post Samsung PM1763 PCIe Gen6 SSD Enters Mass Production With 28.4 GB/s Reads appeared first on StorageReview.com.

Users can officially install Windows OS on their Steam Machine. However, once they do, they can't use the SteamOS. Steam Machine Receives Windows Drivers, But Valve Doesn't Encourage Installing Windows on the Device Yet Steam Machine might one of the most interesting launches from Valve yet, but its hefty price tag has left the community divided. The majority sees $1000 price tag too high, but Valve considers it necessary due to the ongoing DRAM and SSD shortage. Nonetheless, Steam Machine is an interesting gaming console that runs on SteamOS by default, and it is pretty much the ideal choice for […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/valve-ships-official-windows-drivers-for-the-steam-machine-but-installing-it-wipes-steamos-entirely/

I’d like to say change is coming to the SSD market, but the reality is that it’s already here. Looking back, it’s a bit amusing because long before the current NAND and DRAM shortages, I wondered whether SSD performance would eventually plateau with PCIe Gen4. What I didn’t anticipate, and neither did anyone else, was …

The post SanDisk Optimus GX 7100M Gen4 2TB 2230 SSD Review – Small Yet Speedy Gen4 Goes Mainstream appeared first on The SSD Review.

Samsung seems to be finalising the SSD 990, a new upcoming value-oriented M.2 NVMe Gen 4 SSD that recently surfaced briefly on the company’s Canadian website. Screenshots reveal details of the new drive, which slots underneath the existing 990 Evo Plus in Samsung's storage lineup.

The new entry-level drive spotted by VideoCardz uses a PCIe Gen 4 x4 interface, distinguishing it from the 990 Evo Plus, which features a hybrid Gen 4 x4 or Gen 5 x2 interface. According to the leaked specifications, the SSD 990 is a DRAMless design that relies on an updated in-house Samsung controller. The leak also indicates lower write endurance than the TLC-based 990 Evo Plus, suggesting the plain 990 uses QLC NAND flash.

Image credit: VideoCardz

Performance data from the product listings shows sequential transfer speeds reaching the upper limits of the PCIe Gen 4 era. The 2TB variant delivers sequential read speeds up to 7250MB/s, while the 1TB model scales back slightly to 7150MB/s. Both capacities are rated for sequential write speeds up to 6450MB/s. Endurance metrics are listed at 400TBW for the 1TB model and 800TBW for the 2TB model.

Unfortunately, availability is still unknown, but Canadian listings suggest the 1TB version would be around £180 (excluding VAT) and the 2TB model would be close to £350 (also excluding VAT).

KitGuru says: SSD prices are a mess at the moment, so we will have to wait and see how competitive this drive really ends up being. 

Ahead of the launch of PCIe Gen6 CPUs, Micron was at Computex 2026 showing off their first PCIe Gen6 SSD for data centers, the 9650

The post Spotted at Computex 2026: Micron’s First PCIe Gen6 Data Center SSD, the 9650 appeared first on ServeTheHome.

At Computex 2026, Silicon Motion was showcasing its SM8388 and SM8008 SSD controllers for enterprise drives

The post Silicon Motion Shows Off Enterprise SM8008 and SM8388 SSD Controllers at Computex 2026 appeared first on ServeTheHome.

Random write performance in an enterprise SSD is critical as workloads rely heavily on processing thousands of small, scattered, and simultaneous data requests per second.  These are measured in IOPS. Unlike sequential workloads, random writes do not write data in a contiguous line, making them much harder for the SSD to handle.  SQL, Oracle and …

The post Memblaze PBlaze7 7A46 Gen5 6.4TB U2 Enterprise SSD Review – Amazing 1230K Random Write Performance appeared first on The SSD Review.