Samsung 990 Pro 2TB: the fastest drive on this bench, and two of them in RAID 0

The Samsung 990 Pro 2TB is the fastest storage drive tested on this bench — ahead of both the SK Hynix Platinum P41 and the WD_BLACK SN850X, the two drives it competes with most directly.

What is inside it

The 990 Pro is a generational change rather than a refresh. It pairs Samsung’s new Pascal controller with V7 NAND, and adds a 2GB Low Power DDR4 cache.

The 7,450 MB/s rated figure is for an empty drive, which is worth stating plainly — it is the number every manufacturer quotes and the number no drive sustains once it is full and the SLC cache is exhausted.

PCIe 4.0, not 5.0

The 990 Pro is a PCIe 4.0 drive, and that is the right read of the market at this point. Gen 5 drives exist, run hotter, and need heatsinks that fight with graphics cards for space. A Gen 4 drive at the top of its class is the more sensible buy for a working machine.

Two in RAID 0

Striping two 990 Pros doubles the theoretical sequential throughput and doubles the number of devices that can take your data with them. RAID 0 has no redundancy: one drive failing loses the array.

That trade is defensible for a scratch volume — video project files, render output, model checkpoints you can regenerate. It is not defensible for anything you have not backed up elsewhere. Synthetic benchmarks like CrystalDiskMark 8 will show the array at its best; day-to-day work with many small files will show much less of a difference than the numbers suggest.

Where it lands

Worth it if you want the fastest sensible Gen 4 drive and you value the controller and NAND generation over a spec-sheet Gen 5 number.

RAID 0 is worth it if the data on it is reproducible. If it is not, buy one drive and spend the rest on backup.