Samsung·storage
Samsung 990 Pro
Based on 33 credible posts from Hacker News & Bluesky. 6 filtered out as bot-like or off-topic.
Medium confidenceA solid sample; expect small shifts as more owners post. How we score
Scored November 11, 2026
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Owner reviews
Overall owner mood
Most owners are unhappy with it: 55% of 33 reviews are negative. The most common complaint is price & value (6 owners). Owners with 6+ months of use feel about the same (27% positive).
What owners like
Nothing two or more owners agree on yet.
What owners complain about
Price & value raised by 6 owners (3 disagree)
“But for random I/O there's no such thing, and so it seems more expensive.”
Performance raised by 3 owners (1 disagree)
“I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.”
Software & AI raised by 2 owners (1 disagree)
“I've got a Samsung 990 Pro 1TB as my boot drive, and I've had the same symptoms of inexplicable bluescreen/crashes and the drive disappearing from bios/uEFI until full power cycle.”
What owners talk about
- Price & value3 praise · 6 complain
- Performance1 praise · 3 complain
- Software & AI1 praise · 2 complain
Built from the reviews themselves — every quote links to the owner who wrote it.
Every credible owner review, most detailed first. Bots, off-topic comments, and ones that say nothing about using it are left out.
[...] I've had one for 18 months and use it for occasional 1TB backups and big transfers to/from a Dell XPS laptop running Winx64. [...] It was much cheaper to order the laptop with the smallest stock Dell NVME (512GB generic) and immediately upgrade it myself to a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro. The external enclosure made the upgrade much quicker and the savings more than paid for the enclosure plus I got a faster 4TB NVMe than the generic stock Dell NVME 4TB for less money.
[...] I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office. Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. [...]
[...] For example, I have a RAID0 with 4 SSDs (Samsung 990 PRO, so consumer, but quite good for reads). [...] But for random I/O there's no such thing, and so it seems more expensive. [...]
I just replaced my 2013 Mac Pro's 256 GB factory SSD and an external SSD array with a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro with one of these in an old Thunderbolt 2 PCIe 2.0 enclosure I had sitting on the shelf, and it works perfectly. It's obviously limited by Thunderbolt 2 transfer rates, but it's still faster than both the sluggish factory SSD and the SSD RAID, consisting of 4 Samsung 850 Pros in an 8-drive Areca SAS enclosure that also contains 4 2 TB HGST Ultrastars that are somehow still running without a single uncorrectable error after more than 13 years of 24/7 operation in a dusty apartment with questionable climate control. At this point, my money's on both the enclosure and at least two SSDs failing before any of the hard drives. [...]
There's definitely something going on. I've got a Samsung 990 Pro 1TB as my boot drive, and I've had the same symptoms of inexplicable bluescreen/crashes and the drive disappearing from bios/uEFI until full power cycle. It looks like my drive has a Samsung controller, and it's got 75% free space.
In January I upgraded my desktop, 9950X3D £600, 64GB DDR5-6000 £600, MSI MAG Tomahawk X870E £300, Samsung 990 Pro 4TB £350, Asus Prime 9070XT £580. [...] The RAM price was already inflated at that time, and the same kit is now £800, but in October or earlier last year I'd have saved possibly the cost of the CPU/GPU on the whole thing, but now it's be about the cost of a CPU/GPU more expensive. On a side note for anyone not aware, 9950X3D isn't the best choice for pure gaming, 9850X3D is cheaper and marginally better, also I went with 2 sticks of RAM kit, 4 sticks is much harder to run at the advertised speed (6000) which is actually an overclock. [...]
Last fall I bought a 4tb Samsung 990 pro drive for $260. Now it retails between $800-900.
I bought my 13900K box from them after an HN story a couple of years ago in which they openly talked about Samsung's failure to live up to their expectations, and basically apologized for advocating the Samsung 990 Pro drives in the past ( ). Not one vendor in 100 would stand up and say something like that in public. The system I bought from them has been great, and if/when that changes, I don't doubt that they'll have my back when it comes to haggling with Intel.
Neowin touts Samsung 990 Pro 2TB NVMe at "under $400." I bought one in 2023 for $139. Can we ever get back to those prices? [...]
I bought a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB SSD last year for $140. It's currently selling on Amazon for $430.
[19 months later] We regret to inform you that your Samsung 990 Pro is dead, and the price for them has nearly quadrupled.
I bought a 2TB NVMe SSD (Samsung 990 Pro) for $130 in November 2023. [...] Can't wait for this shit to crash and burn 🔥
I got a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD 2 years ago for like $300, same thing is now going for $800
Just tangentially I have a Samsung 990 pro 2tb and Corsair 64 gb ddr5 ram (bought about 12-18 months ago) ssd was $199 when I got it, 390 online now. RAM about 329 on Newegg 10/1/25 - $1,179 now!
Got a 2TB Samsung 990 Pro in my laptop last year for $99 on Black Friday of all things
[...] I bought it with 32 and OWC sold me the exact same sticks of memory (manufacturer, timings) for $1,050. [...] $1,200 for 4 x 2TB Samsung 990 Pros and a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe enclosure. [...]
[...] 4×4Tb Samsung 990 Pro for a RAID-10 array, $399.97 CAD each on Amazon this last fall. [...]
A Samsung 990 Pro dips to the same prices. I got a 2TB one for $150 this Black Friday. [...] You get a lot of compute for cheap though :/
[...] Any SSD will work, I use a Samsung 990 pro inside. [...]
I was ballparking it based on my recent buy of a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB and inflated the price a little in my head to closer to $400 than the $330 it actually was. I also, as a side note, try to give the loosest most favorable (to my opposite) comparison because when I err on my side it becomes a "well actually" debate a lot of the time about how it's "not quite X times as many it's more like X-1 (so I'm not even going to touch that X-1 is still quite bad)" that is really tedious and annoying especially when the favorable version of the comparison is still quite bad for their point/side.
[...] I have a Samsung 990 pro bought on Amazon and have the random lags. [...] The Samsung Magician app on Windows reports it as "genuine" and it was able to apply two firmware updates. [...]
I bought a Samsung 990 PRO NVMe SSD in November 2024 for $270. [...]
In 2024 I bought 96GB of DDR5 memory for my System76 laptop, for $237. [...] I also bought a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD for $290. [...]
I am scared of updating my Proxmox instances due to issues I've had with Samsung 990 Pro nvmes
I bought a Samsung 990 Pro in November for $146.99. That's crazypants.
In November 2024 I bought a new computer and a PS5. The 4TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe drive I added to the PC was $289 then, it’s $799 now. [...]
I kinda hope so....I saw the "new" price for a 2TB M.2 SSD last weekend here... I bought a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro in Nov for $400 CAD. Last Friday I saw a 2TB WDBLACK SN7100 going for $1080 CAD.
[...] I convinced myself to buy the 2TB Samsung 990 Pro with heatsink for only $78. I mean, shit, the PS5 Pro will be my last PlayStation, so many as well download everything I own. [...]
[...] is there a way to set moderately fast consumer NVMe SSDs (I've got both a Samsung 990 Pro and a WD SN850X) in a complete read-only mode to prevent "wear"?
[...] I believe just one Samsung 990 Pro can write at just over 50Gbps). [...] In practice the CPU physically cannot transfer bits fast enough, because its a dinky underpowered ARM CPU that they clearly chose to hit that quite affordable price point. [...]
[...] Some information for the two physical machines: 1) ryzen: Ryzen 9 9900X, RAID0 with 4x Samsung 990 PRO 1TB (in Asus Hyper M.2 Gen5 card) 2) xeon: E5-2699v4, WD Ultrastar DC SN640 960GB (U.3) I don't know what exactly is backing the SSD storage on the Azure instance.
[...] SSDs are fast, but they're several orders of magnitude slower than RAM, which is orders of magnitude slower than CPU Cache. Samsung 990 Pro 2TB has a latency of 40 μs DDR4-2133 with a CAS 15 has a latency of 14 nano seconds. [...]
[...] Not sure about the Samsung 990 Pro.
Samsung 990 Pro long-term: how it holds up
When problems show up
- Price & valuetypically around 1.8 years · 2 reports
- Performancetypically around 7 months · 2 reports
The claims, and the evidence
What the brand claims
No published claims on file for this product yet.
What owners report
“[...] I've had one for 18 months and use it for occasional 1TB backups and big transfers to/from a Dell XPS laptop running Winx64. [...] It was much cheaper to order the laptop with the smallest stock Dell NVME (512GB generic) and immediately upgrade it myself to a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro. The external enclosure made the upgrade much quicker and the savings more than paid for the enclosure plus I got a faster 4TB NVMe than the generic stock Dell NVME 4TB for less money.”
after 18 monthsView on Hacker News“I just replaced my 2013 Mac Pro's 256 GB factory SSD and an external SSD array with a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro with one of these in an old Thunderbolt 2 PCIe 2.0 enclosure I had sitting on the shelf, and it works perfectly. It's obviously limited by Thunderbolt 2 transfer rates, but it's still faster than both the sluggish factory SSD and the SSD RAID, consisting of 4 Samsung 850 Pros in an 8-drive Areca SAS enclosure that also contains 4 2 TB HGST Ultrastars that are somehow still running without a single uncorrectable error after more than 13 years of 24/7 operation in a dusty apartment with questionable climate control. At this point, my money's on both the enclosure and at least two SSDs failing before any of the hard drives. [...]”
“In January I upgraded my desktop, 9950X3D £600, 64GB DDR5-6000 £600, MSI MAG Tomahawk X870E £300, Samsung 990 Pro 4TB £350, Asus Prime 9070XT £580. [...] The RAM price was already inflated at that time, and the same kit is now £800, but in October or earlier last year I'd have saved possibly the cost of the CPU/GPU on the whole thing, but now it's be about the cost of a CPU/GPU more expensive. On a side note for anyone not aware, 9950X3D isn't the best choice for pure gaming, 9850X3D is cheaper and marginally better, also I went with 2 sticks of RAM kit, 4 sticks is much harder to run at the advertised speed (6000) which is actually an overclock. [...]”
“Last fall I bought a 4tb Samsung 990 pro drive for $260. Now it retails between $800-900.”
after 1 yearView on Hacker News
Common Samsung 990 Pro problems
Problems most owners who mention them agree on, plus ones owners are split on.
- Price & value6 owners report this (3 disagree)View on Bluesky
“Can we ever get back to those prices?”
- Performance3 owners report this (1 disagree)View on Hacker News
“I have a Samsung 990 pro bought on Amazon and have the random lags.”
- Software & AI2 owners report this (1 disagree)View on Bluesky
“Can't wait for this shit to crash and burn 🔥”