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Samsung accidentally published a page for its upcoming NVMe 990 Evo SSD with marketing materials and technical characteristics. The 990 Evo is a mid-range SSD that offers read and write speeds of 5000 MB/s and 4200 MB/s respectively. However, the new product is unique in its configuration of PCIe lanes.
The 990 Evo's unique feature is PCIe 5.0 support, but with only two lanes, which is equivalent to the throughput of the four PCIe 4.0 lanes that the drive also offers. It is not yet entirely clear what forced the engineers to equip the drive with simultaneously four PCIe 4.0 lanes and two PCIe 5.0 lanes. PCIe 4.0 SSDs work fine in PCIe 5.0 slots, so technically the 990 Evo has no advantage in supporting PCIe 5.0, especially since PCIe 4.0 is not a bottleneck in this case.
| Model | 990 Evo 1 TB | 990 Pro 1 TB | 970 Evo Plus 1 TB |
| Form factor | M.2 2280 | M.2 2280 | M.2 2280 |
| Interface | PCIe 4.0 x4/PCIe 5.0 x2 | PCIe 4.0 x4 | PCIe 4.0 x4 |
| Reading speed | 5000 MB/s | 7450 MB/s | 3400 MB/s |
| Writing speed | 4200 MB/s | 6900 MB/s | 2500 MB/s |
| Random reads | 680K IOPS | 1,200K IOPS | 500K IOPS |
| Random writes | 800K IOPS | 1,550K IOPS | 450K IOPS |
However, there is a niche scenario where these two PCIe 5.0 lanes could come in handy. Although the throughput of two PCIe 5.0 lanes and four PCIe 4.0 lanes is 8000 MB/s, there is a difference if the connection connector only has two lanes. On a dual-channel PCIe 5.0 interface, a PCIe 4.0 SSD will only be able to use two lanes, and its throughput will be halved, from 8000 MB/s to 4000 MB/s. But the Samsung 990 Evo will be able to retain full bandwidth as it can run on those two lanes at PCIe 5.0 speeds. Additionally, using two lanes instead of four can also save some power.
The official price level for the new SSD Samsung 990 Evo has not yet been announced. The prices of these new products appeared on the Amazon Germany website, but they turned out to be higher than those of the flagship 990 Pro drive, and they were soon removed from the site.
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