Samsung’s new 990 EVO SSD ideal for everyday use, more demanding work

Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest memory chipmaker, on Wednesday announced a new addition to its consumer solid-state drive (SSD) lineup as the company expects an imminent rebound in the sluggish NAND chip market.

The South Korean tech giant said the 990 EVO, a NAND-based storage device, boasts elevated performance with improved energy efficiency, making it ideal for everyday use as well as for more demanding computing and gaming applications.

The non-volatile memory express (NVMe) SSD uses Samsung’s eighth-generation V-NAND technology,

Samsung said the 990 EVO offers enhanced performance of up to 43% compared to the previous model, the 970 EVO Plus.

The latest model shows a sequential read speed of up to 5,000 megabytes-per-second (MB/s) and a write speed of up to 4,200 MB/s, allowing for faster access to large-scale data files.

The 990 EVO improved power efficiency by 70% compared with the 970 EVO Plus, allowing extended use on PCs without constant concern for battery life, Samsung said.

“For our latest consumer product, we have combined innovation with practicality to enhance users’ computing experiences,” said Sohn Han-gu, vice president of the memory brand product business team at Samsung.

“The 990 EVO balances performance, power efficiency and reliability, making it a versatile choice for the latest interface that is suitable for a variety of everyday tasks, including gaming, business workflow and creative endeavors.”

DRAM-LESS DESIGN

By using host memory buffer (HMB) technology to directly link to the host processor’s DRAM, the 990 EVO SSD can achieve optimized performance even with a DRAM-less design.

Supporting both the PCIe 4.0 interface and the next-generation PCIe 5.0 interfaces, the 990 EVO is suitable for PCIe 5.0-based ultra-slim laptops without performance degradation.

The 990 EVO, which comes in 1-terabyte and 2 TB capacity options, is available in Korea from Wednesday and will be sold globally later.

Samsung said the 1 TB 990 EVO will retail at $124.99 and the 2 TB model at $209.99.

Chipmakers are competitively unveiling new SSDs to grab a greater share of the growing market.

Last August, Samsung tied up with US cloud software provider VMware Inc. to strengthen its SSD competitiveness.

Its crosstown rival SK Hynix Inc., which is the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker, also unveiled a series of new SSDs to expand its presence in the corporate and consumer markets for high-capacity storage devices.

NAND MARKET RECOVERY

The global NAND market, which has been sluggish for years, is expected to rebound as early as this year.

According to market research firm Omdia, the NAND market is expected to grow at an annual average rate of 23.8% to $87 billion by 2027, a 2.35-fold increase from 2023.

With the growing use of artificial intelligence across industries, data processing volumes are rapidly increasing, aided by improved graphics processing unit (GPU) performance.

Analysts said an increasing number of laptops will adopt the PCIe 5.0-based SSDs from this year.

Omdia expects the PCIe-based SSD market to grow at an annual average rate of 17% through 2027, with such SSDs accounting for 99% of the total storage device market by then.

Samsung has been the SSD market leader since 2006, with its market share reaching 40.1% as of 2022.

Write to Eui-Myung Park at uimyung@hankyung.com

In-Soo Nam edited this article.