Look, we don’t want to create the impression that we get excited about all storage technology, but the latest solid state drive from Samsung has us excited.

That SSD is the 990 PRO. The drive takes advantage of the PCIe 4.0 interface to deliver read speeds of up to 7.45GBps and write speeds of up to 6.9GBps. As for random performance, random read and write speeds come in at up to 1 400K and 1 550K IOPS respectively. This, Samsung claims is a 55 percent improvement from the 980 PRO.

“With continuing innovations in gaming, 4K and 8K technology as well as AI-driven applications, consumers’ need for high-performance storage is growing exponentially,” vice president of the Memory Brand Product Biz Team at Samsung Electronics, KyuYoung Lee said in a press release.

“The 990 PRO provides an optimal balance of speed, power efficiency and reliability, making it an ideal choice for avid gamers and creative professionals seeking uninterrupted work and play,” Lee added.

The memory being used for the 990 PRO is Samsung’s own V-NAND 3-bit TLC and low-power DDR4 RAM is installed in each drive as well. The controller is proprietary Samsung tech and is said to improve power efficiency by 50 percent when compared to the previous generation. This is great news for gaming notebooks.

The 990 PRO will be available in two iterations, one with a Heatsink (with RGB lighting) and one without the heatsink. The heatsink should give the SSD better thermal performance and keep the drive within acceptable operating temperatures of between 0 and 70 degrees Celsius.

The Samsung 990 PRO is available in three capacities: 1TB, 2TB and 4TB. However, the 4TB iteration will only be available in 2023.

Data encryption standards that are supported include AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption, TCG/Opal V2.0 and Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667).

As for pricing, Samsung has recommended pricing of $179 (~R3 017)for the 1TB 990 PRO and $309 (~R5 209) for the 2TB 990 PRO.