Samsung 990 Gen4 1TB M.2 Review
Introduction and Technical Specifications
Introduction
Have you been living under a rock for the past couple of years? If so you might be wondering why we’re reviewing a 1TB Gen4 M.2 drive. If you haven’t, and are aware of the skyrocketing memory chip prices that have rendered absolutely everything, from a simple drive like this to a RTX 5080, significantly more expensive than they were, you’ll understand straight away.
The insanity of memory pricing is probably best exemplified here. This Samsung 990 Gen4 1TB drive has an MSRP of £212.19. The 2TB model has an MSRP of £411.99. Two years ago you could get a 4TB Gen5 for under a couple of hundred notes. The situation is untenable. We all need storage, and almost everything uses memory chips. Your current rig might survive a bit, but upgrades happen. The world requires storage all the time. Heck, the AI bubble only really inflated in the last 18 months or so, and it gobbled up all the fast chips on the planet. Understandably, a solution is required, and one that might last until the uniqueness of making your granny look like a cartoon fades away and the market is flooded with ex-server M.2s.
Samsung has decided to leverage its market position and expertise to introduce new Samsung 990 Gen4 drives in both 1 TB and 2 TB capacities. We’ve got the 1TB version in for review. Why? We refer you to the limitations thing we said about right above. Throughout our testing today, you need to remember that a lot of the drives in our graphs are Gen5 models tested in the before times. You know, when you could buy a big M.2 without having to leave your gold-plated Bugatti as a deposit. But Gen4 storage is still a 7 GB/s thing, so it’s never going to be slow.
Technical Specifications
Up Close
Nobody would ever accuse a M.2 drive of being a particularly interesting specimen to look at, but for those of you who like completeness, here it is. A very blue box gives away that this isn’t a regular Gen5 drive.
The bare necessities of life. Otherwise known as simple and clean. Devoid of any unnecessary fluff.
