Samsung’s new flagship SSDs are even more overkill for your PS5
Samsung has announced a new version of its flagship PCIe SSD, dubbed the 990 Pro. Not only does the PCIe 4.0 M.2 storage device get even closer to being as fast as it can theoretically be, but there’s also the option of getting it with a heatsink that comes complete with RGB lighting (though, if you get that version to upgrade a PlayStation 5, which requires add-on SSDs to have a heatsink, those lights will likely get lost behind a layer of textured plastic).
The 990 Pro’s big selling point over its predecessor is that it’s even faster: in sequential reads and writes, it can do up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s, respectively, and it can achieve 1,400K random read input / output operations per second (or IOPS). That’s compared to the 980 Pro’s maximums of 7,000 MB/s for sequential reads, 5,000 MB/s for sequential writes, and 1,000K random read IOPS. While these speeds aren’t completely unheard of, they’re certainly not the norm — even high-end models from WD and Sabrent don’t really come close when it comes to write speeds.
Impressive as it is, the performance jump isn’t anywhere near what we saw from the 970 Pro to the 980 Pro when Samsung upgraded from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0. Still, given how close Samsung was to maxing out the 8,000 MB/s theoretical limit of a PCIe 4.0 SSD with the 980’s read speeds, it’s impressive that it managed to get even closer. It’s also probably a bit overkill for all but the most advanced PC and console gaming; per Sony, an add-on SSD for the PS5 only has to be able to do 5,000 MB/s in sequential reads.
Samsung didn’t immediately answer The Verge’s question on how it was able to squeeze even more speed out of its SSDs without upgrading to a newer version of PCIe, but its press release does mention
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