Samsung's 990 Pro isn't the best 2TB Black Friday SSD deal, I bought one of these instead

pcgamer.com:

We're well into the Black Friday deals now, and as a result we're seeing discounts flood in on just about everything from CPUs to SSDs. But when it comes to the latter, there's a recommendation that keeps hitting our feeds that I somewhat disagree with, and it's for the Samsung 990 Pro Series 2TB.

Now don't get me wrong. The 990 Pro is a fine drive, and I'd even go far as to call it excellent when it comes to raw performance. 7,450 MB/s sequential read speeds, 6900 MB/s writes, and it comes from a well-known brand with all the prestige that comes with, despite some rather PR damaging firmware issues that may have since been fixed, but don't exactly inspire confidence.

But when it comes down to it, the truth is that, while the 990 Pro is not necessarily a bad pick for a 2TB solution, it's simply not the best value for money, at least at the prices we're currently seeing. Best Buy currently has this Samsung drive on discount at $119, but for that money there are some real alternatives to consider.

Below are three contenders that I reckon go toe-to-toe with the Samsung, and as far as bang-for-your-buck goes, come out on top.

Lexar NM790 | 2TB | PCIe 4.0 | 7,400MB/s read | 6,500MB/s write | $124.99$109.99 at Amazon (save $15)
Lexar has put together a superb SSD in the NM790, and the best bit is it's surprisingly cheap. Thanks to high layer NAND and a low-power controller, you can get tons of storage here on an energy-efficient and great performing drive for not much cash. Often much less cash than the competition, even. Read our Lexar NM790 (4TB) review for more.

First up, let's take a look at the Lexar NM790 2TB. I actually use this exact model as the main drive in my personal system, and can confirm it's as fast as you