The 4TB Samsung 990 Pro M.2 solid-state drive has dropped 27% in price, falling from $1,099 to $799.90. The saving of more than $300 works out to roughly 20 cents per gigabyte of storage, according to Tom's Hardware.
The discount stands out because of the current market. The AI boom has pushed up prices for memory and storage, sending SSD costs to very high levels. Against that backdrop, a cut of this size is notable for buyers who need a lot of capacity.
The 990 Pro was once the fastest PCIe Gen 4 drive on sale. Newer PCIe 5.0 drives are now available, but the 4TB model still offers very fast performance and a large capacity in a single-sided M.2 2280 form factor, which suits systems where space is limited.
On paper, the drive is rated for maximum sequential reads of 7,450 MB/s and sequential writes of 6,900 MB/s, close to the ceiling of Gen 4 bandwidth. Random reads reach 1.6 million IOPS and random writes 1.55 million IOPS. Endurance is rated at 2,400 TBW. Samsung builds the 4TB capacity using 236-layer TLC V-NAND.
Tom's Hardware reviewed the drive when it launched and named it one of the best 4TB SSDs available and among the best overall. In testing, it scored above its competition on nearly every benchmark. In 3DMark's storage test it posted the lowest latency of the drives compared, which the publication said is a plus for responsive game load times.
The drive also held up well under sustained writing. In IOMeter sustained sequential write tests, the 4TB 990 Pro kept a speed of 6.2 GB/s for 75 seconds, helped by a 10GB pSLC cache. Once data spilled over into the TLC memory, speeds fell to 1.6 GB/s.
On power efficiency, the drive delivered 421.1 MB/s per watt. That placed it ahead of every competitor in the comparison except the Addlink A93 4TB and the Lexar NM790 4TB.
Even with the cut, the price is far from the lows of past years. Stewart Bendle, the deals writer at Tom's Hardware, said he is unsure when, if ever, storage will return to those levels, and certainly not for a considerable time. For anyone who wants 4TB now, he described the 990 Pro as a formidable choice, advising buyers to look for the deepest available discount.
