Samsung came at late 2022 with their latest proposal for a top performer with the Samsung 990Pro series that supposed to further improve performance (both reading/writing) compared with the previous 980Pro series. We tested the 1TB variant of both drives so we can have a better understanding of what both drives are capable off.

The 990Pro 1TB has higher reading/writing performance, compared with the 980Pro series, that proved to be true, especially with sequential (big) files. When reading smaller files, the performance gap will be not as big as we expected. Both drives share similar design, with 1GB of onboard cache memory that helps with writing performance. And for file sizes up to 80-100GB, this will be true, afterwards both NVME SSDs will drop writing speed.

The Samsung 990Pro also supposed to have slight less power consumption that also supposed to help with overall working temperatures, well this we cannot say that is exactly true, at least in our test bench (closed case and both NVMEs with Asus passive NVME coolers), there was a 2 Celsius difference between them in favor of the Samsung 980Pro 1TB.

Both the Samsung 980Pro 1TB and the Samsung 990Pro 1TB have the same 5 years of warranty, and the increased performance of the Samsung 990Pro 1TB comes with a higher retail price of 32 Euro difference, which may be not so high for some users. In any case we feel that if you wish the best possible performance from the Samsung lineup, the Samsung 990Pro will cover you, however if you already have a Samsung 980Pro 1TB, then, we don’t feel that you should change it, unless you are daily writing/reading very big sized files.