Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe M.2 2280

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB is a stupid-fast, power-sipping storage monster that makes DRAM-less drives finally feel premium. Just don't overpay for it, the price spread on this thing is criminal.

The sequential numbers are legit. 7,250 MB/s read and 6,300 MB/s write put this drive in the top 15% of everything in our database. Random performance is even more impressive, landing in the 96th percentile overall. That's the kind of headroom that makes a difference when you're juggling game installs, video exports, and a dozen browser tabs. The DRAM-less design scared some folks off, but HMB tech has come far enough that you'd be hard pressed to notice the difference in daily use. Samsung's Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 keeps write speeds from cratering during big transfers, which is where cheaper DRAM-less drives usually fall apart. The heat spreader label does its job too. We saw no thermal throttling in our testing, even under sustained load.

The 990 EVO Plus sits in a weird spot. It's faster than the WD Black SN850X in sequential reads, but the SN850X has DRAM and a proven track record for sustained writes. The Crucial T500 is the closest real competitor, matching Samsung on speed while often undercutting it on price. The Kingston FURY Renegade G5 is a wildcard, great drive but harder to find in stock. If you want the absolute fastest PCIe 4.0 drive with DRAM, the SN850X or T500 are still the safer picks for heavy sustained workloads. But for everyday gaming, boot drives, and general use, the 990 EVO Plus trades blows with all of them while sipping less power. That efficiency matters in laptops, where this drive scored 95.5/100 in our laptop use case.

The price of this drive varies widely. Listings range from $345 to $1,050 for the exact same 4TB drive, a $705 spread. Paying near the top of that range means you're overpaying. At the low end, around $345, it's one of the best dollar-per-gigabyte deals on a high-performance 4TB NVMe drive currently available. Shop around and don't just grab the first Amazon listing you see. The best deals in our data come from the lower-priced US listings, so do your homework before you click buy.

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB is the drive you buy when you want a massive slab of fast storage without thinking too hard about it. It hits 7,250 MB/s reads and 6,300 MB/s writes, which puts it in the top tier of PCIe 4.0 drives we've tested. The headline here is capacity plus speed. 4TB of TLC NAND with a 2,400 TBW endurance rating means this thing will outlive most of the PCs it gets installed in. Samsung's DRAM-less design with HMB (Host Memory Buffer) is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and honestly, it works better than most people expect. You're not giving up real-world performance for the power savings.

If you're building a portable rig or need something for an external enclosure, this isn't your drive. The portable use case score of 24.6/100 is one of the worst we've seen for this category. Grab a WD Black SN850X or a Crucial T500 instead if you need sustained write performance for heavy video editing or database work. And if you're on a tight budget, there are cheaper 4TB options that'll get you 90% of the real-world performance for less cash.

Buy it. The Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB is the best combination of capacity, speed, and efficiency you can get right now without jumping to PCIe 5.0 pricing. The DRAM-less design is a non-issue for 99% of users, and the endurance rating means you won't be replacing this drive anytime soon. Just make sure you're paying the low end of that price range. At $345, it's a no-brainer. At $1,050, you're getting ripped off.