If there’s one thing the Steam Summer Sale always teaches me, it’s that you can never have enough storage. Games continue to take up more and more SSD space, as both worlds and textures grow in size and fidelity. This makes drives like 990 Evo Plus 4TB a godsend, affording your system more speed and room to breathe at a reasonable price.
Samsung 990 Evo Plus 4TB
“Upgrade everyday performance.” – Samsung
Head over to Amazon US and you can grab yourself a 990 Evo Plus SSD with 4TB of storage for only $234.99. Not only is that a tidy 28% ($93) off its list price, it’s also the most-affordable this particular capacity has ever been.
Those in the UK can grab this stick of storage at an all-time low price too, to the tune of £225.82. 2TB and 1TB alternatives are available with welcome discounts too, if you fancy something less-spacious and cheaper.
990 Evo Plus is a unique drive, in that its interface can either run in a PCIe 5.0 x2 configuration or 4.0 x4. Whichever is most useful to you will depend on the lanes available on your motherboard or laptop, but it’s a nice-to-have regardless of your system’s specifications.
Regardless of PCIe configuration, the SSD will deliver respective sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,250MB/s and 6,300MB/s. This level of performance puts it towards the higher-end of what’s possible on Gen 4 storage, making it a great value purchase for pretty much all folks save those that demand the very best.
Samsung has greatly improved the efficiency of 990 Evo Plus over its original 990 Evo design. Power consumption varies depending on capacity, but the 4TB model will pull 5.5W during reads and 4.8W for writes on average.
There’s no heatsink variant of 990 Evo Plus available to buy, so you’ll need to pair it with an aftermarket cooler or rely on the passive cooling of your motherboard. Without assistance, like many of its peers, the drive will thermal throttle under load. To get the most out of the SSD, it’s in your interest to keep it cool.
I’ve enjoyed using Samsung Magician ever since 2.5in SATA SSDs were the latest and greatest thing in storage, and it remains my favourite storage software now. Through the application, it’s easy to check the health of your drive as well as prolong its lifespan through methods like overprovisioning.
In terms of endurance, Samsung quotes a rating of 2,400TBW for the drive. Good luck hitting that metric, though, as you’d need to fill 990 Evo Plus 600 times. Instead, turn your attentions to the five-year warranty for peace of mind.
Prime Day is just around the corner, so make sure you’re following Club386 on Google News so you don’t miss any delectable discounts.
