Samsung showed off the 990 Pro series SSD with significant improvements in speed and efficiency

Samsung has finally updated its popular SSD line-up with the 990 Pro series of NVMe solid-state drives. According to the company, the new drives will reach the highest speeds that are only possible for the PCIe 4.0 interface. Models with PCI 5.0 support should be released later and will be even faster. With the new lineup, Samsung hopes to deliver better performance for PC and console gaming, 4K and 8K content, and other data usage scenarios.

The Samsung 990 Pro drive boasts sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s. The 980 Pro offers read and write speeds of up to 7000 MB/s and 5100 MB/s. According to Samsung, the random read and write speeds of the 990 Pro are up to 1,400,000 and 1,550,000 I/O operations per second. The company claims it’s 55% faster than the 980 performance Pro.

In addition, the company claims that the 990 Pro will be 50% more energy efficient than the previous line. The latest solid state drives feature an updated nickel-plated controller as well as a heat spreader label for temperature management.

The 990 Pro also uses Samsung’s Dynamic Thermal Guard technology to keep the drive temperature in an optimal range. There is a version that offers an additional thermostat, as well as RGB lighting.

Samsung will start selling the 990 Pro series in October. SSD prices in the US start at $179 for the 1TB model and $309 for the 2TB version. Next year, the company also plans to offer a variant with 4 TB of memory.