Samsung will soon launch its new SSD 990 Pro, which instead of opting for the use of PCIe gen5, uses the older PCIe 4.0 technology. It has been designed for Direct Storage Microsoft and for the PS5, while it's affordable, in the price realm.
While Samsung already manufactures PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSDs, which offer much faster sequential speeds and I/O operations per second; samsung seems like going to stay at PCIe 4.0 for the time being for consumer-facing devices. And it is that in an SSD, there is more than the interconnection. The NAND storage chips themselves, the software and firmware, and the SSD controller also influence performance.
Samsung still sees PCIe 4.0 in SSD useful for consumers
Samsung's SSD 990 Pro features slightly higher sequential read speeds and significantly higher write speeds than the last generation 980 Pro model. For random reads and writes, the gain is much more substantial, having 55% more IOPS. Along with the optimizations for the Microsoft DirectStorage API, the Samsung 990 Pro should have much faster load times in games and other applications where higher random performance is beneficial.
Samsung also says that the 990 Pro is up to 50% more efficient than the 980 Pro. This would make it easier to reduce heat and improve battery life in laptops and other devices that can use NVMe SSDs. The previous generation 980 Pro can consume up to 9 watts, about the same as a low-end mobile CPU.
Pre-orders for the 1TB and 2TB models start on November 1st, and are priced at US$169 and US$289 respectively. They are prices similar to those of the 980 Pro when it was released. A 4TB capacity model will also be available in 2023, likely with similar performance to the 1TB and 2TB versions. Samsung will also offer 1TB and 2TB versions with heat sink, 20 dollars more expensive; specially designed for the PlayStation 5 and thus increase the base capacity of the console up to 2 TB and be able to host many more games.
Source: Digital Trends
