The Samsung 990 Pro is the latest NVMe SSD to receive the green light from the PCI-SIG as a compliant PCIe 5.0 x4 device, confirming its existence before the South Korean tech giant was able to formally announce it. Not much is known about the potentially speedy storage solution right now, but we can safely speculate some things about it.
The few details about the Samsung 990 Pro on the PCI-SIG website (via VideoCardz), don’t reveal much that wasn’t already a forgone conclusion. It uses four PCIe 5.0 lanes, which allows for speeds of up to 32GT/s, double that of its PCIe 4.0 counterparts. While this doesn’t reveal what kind of speeds we can expect from the SSD, we’ve already seen enterprise devices running at 13,000MB/s, and it’s likely that these consumer models will run at similar or the exact same speed. Such specs would make the 990 Pro one of if not the best SSD for gaming.
We don’t know for certain what M.2 form factor the Samsung 990 Pro will adopt, but if its predecessors are anything to go by, then we shouldn’t expect anything smaller than a 2280 drive. You’ll likely be able to pick up one with or without a heatsink too.
Should you want to plug in a Samsung 990 Pro into your gaming PC, you’ll need to make sure that you have one of the best gaming motherboards in your system alongside a compatible processor. Currently, 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs are the only chips to support the PCIe 5.0 standard, but AMD Ryzen 7000 and Intel Raptor Lake will also be compatible with these new speedy fast NVMe SSDs too when they roll around.