Samsung's 990 EVO SSD could support both PCIe 4.0 x4 and PCIe 5.0 x2

What just happened? Samsung Ukraine has seemingly listed the 990 Evo SSD on its official website prematurely, revealing some of the key specs. The next-gen drive is expected to debut in the near future, competing with mid-range offerings from Western Digital, Teamgroup, Crucial, and other SSD vendors.

The listing was spotted by German tech site WinFuture, revealing some interesting tidbits. The most notable feature of the 990 Evo is its PCIe lane configuration, with the listing suggesting that the drive will support both PCIe 4.0 x4 and PCIe 5.0 x2 connectivity. While the PCIe 5.0 support will be a step in the right direction, the availability of only two lanes means that there won't actually be much of an incentive to use the PCIe 5.0 x4 slot, as it will use up valuable lanes.

In terms of speeds, the 990 EVO will not be the fastest SSD in the market, offering only up to 5,000MB/s sequential read speeds and 4,200MB/s sequential write speeds. While that's not exactly slow by any means, they are also nothing to write home about for a PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD. To put things in perspective, Samsung's own 990 Pro SSD offers sequential read speeds of up to 7,450MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 6,900MB/s.

The random read speeds, meanwhile, were listed at 680,000 IOPS, while the random write speeds top out at 800,000 IOPS. Both are significantly lower than the random read and write speeds of the 990 Pro, which can hit up to 1,200,000 IOPS and 1,550,000 IOPS, respectively. The new drives will have the M.2 2280 form factor like most modern mainstream consumer SSDs.

The 990 Evo will be an upgrade over the 970 Evo Plus, which was launched way back in 2019 and has begun to get a little long in the tooth. The upcoming drives will be significantly faster than their predecessors and will also offer upgraded connectivity, especially considering that the 970 series only supported PCIe 3.0.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/101439-samsung-990-evo-ssd-could-support-both-pcie.html

Why? -___- who needs this!

TechSavy101 said:

Why? -___- who needs this!

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Could be handy for mini-PC or laptop board designers when they know the design isn't going to handle the heat of PCIe5 x4 SSDs, or isn't aiming to provide PCIe5 SSD support anyway. In that case, if the CPU/chipset lanes are all PCIe5, might as well split further and use the bandwidth for other ports.

We also have those secondary M.2 and PCIe slots that share bandwidth on many motherboards. Normally only one of the slots can be populated, but perhaps with enough peripherals supporting PCIe5 x2, we can have both populated now and opportunistically allocate full x4 bandwidth only if one of them are populated. Kinda like those x16 or x8x8 slots, but doing x4 or x2x2 instead.