Two weeks ago, Samsung announced it would soon deliver a 4TB version of its popular 990 Pro SSD, which is among the best SSDs on the market. Samsung teased the existence of the SSD but it didn’t provide any guidance on pricing.
Today, Samsung confirmed that the 990 Pro 4TB carries an MSRP of $344.99 for the bare drive (MZ-V9P4T0BW), or $354.99 if you opt for the version with an integrated heatsink (MZ-V9P4T0CW). That is quite a hefty premium over the less capacious versions of the SSD. The 990 Pro 2TB with a heatsink (MZ-V9P2T0CW) currently sells for just $149 on Amazon. However, we’re likely to see prices for the 990 Pro 4TB slowly drop as availability expands in the marketplace (for example, the WD_BLACK 4TB SN850X has a street price of around $300).
Performance specs for the 990 Pro 4TB are nearly identical to its 1TB and 2TB siblings, meaning that it offers sequential reads of 7,400 MB/s and sequential writes of 6,900 MB/s. Random write performance remains the same as the 2TB SKU at 1,550,000 IOPS, while random read performance increases from 1,400,000 IOPS to 1,600,000 IOPS. Additionally, endurance doubles from 1,200 TBW on the 990 Pro 2TB to 2,400 TBW for the 990 Pro 4TB. While Samsung is still using 176-layer TLC NAND with the 990 Pro, the size of the onboard LPDDR4 cache has doubled to 4GB.
Samsung 990 Pro Specifications
| Model | Pricing | Capacity | Sequential Read (MB/s) | Sequential Write (MB/s) | Random Read (IOPS) | Random Write (IOPS) | Cache Memory (LPPDR4) | Endurance (TBW) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MZ-V9P4T0CW / MZ-V9P4T0BW | $354.99 / $344.99 | 4TB | 7,450 | 6,900 | 1,600,000 | 1,550,000 | 4GB | 2,400 |
| MZ-V9P2T0CW / MZ-V9P2T0BW | $149.99 / $169.99 | 2TB | 7,450 | 6,900 | 1,400,000 | 1,550,000 | 2GB | 1,200 |
| MZ-V9P1T0CW / MZ-V9P1T0BW | $84.99 / $89.99 | 1TB | 7,450 | 6,900 | 1,200,000 | 1,550,000 | 1GB | 600 |
The 990 Pro 4TB is still PCIe 4.0-based, so it doesn’t offer the maximum performance potential of today’s PCIe 5.0 SSDs. However, among the PCIe 4.0 competition, the 990 Pro 4TB should remain among the fastest available. And its 2TB counterpart is already our top pick for the best overall SSD.
We may think of high-performance SSDs like the 990 Pro 4TB as being primarily for the PC domain, but it also makes a perfect companion for Sony’s PlayStation 5. Adding a 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD via the one available storage expansion slot dramatically improves upon the system’s internal 825GB SSD (of which only 667GB is available for games). With some of today’s games easily taking up 100GB of storage space or more, 4TB provides a lot of headroom.
According to Samsung, the 990 Pro (MZ-V9P4T0BW and MZ-V9P2T0CW) will be available directly from Samsung.com and at “select retailers” starting in October. Hopefully we’ll start seeing some incredible discounts on the SSDs in time for Black Friday.
