Samsung's slower version of the 990 Pro SSD costs way more than the original
Engadget · C · trust 43/100
Samsung In 2022, Samsung introduced its 990 Pro series of solid state drives. At the time, these SSDs promised pretty impressive speeds and power for heavy-duty use cases, and they were available for $179 in a 1TB size or $309 for 2TB.
Fast forward to today, as Samsung announces a new, non-Pro model addition to this solid state drive lineup. Thanks to the soaring component costs of 2026, Samsung's 990 SSD will now run you $270 for 1TB and a staggering $530 for 2TB. And the real kicker: it's slower than the original 990 Pro model from 2022. The 2026 version promises sequential read and write speeds maxing out at 7,250 MB/s and 6,450 MB/s, while the random read and write speeds cap out at 850K and 1,200K input/output operations per second. The original SSD from 2022 had sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s and random read and write speeds of up to 1,400K and 1,550K input/output operations per second.
Barring typos in the press announcement we received, that's slower performance for a 50 percent higher cost. The 990 Pro SSD hasn't escaped price hikes either. The 1TB model now costs $320 and the 2TB has more than doubled its initial price at $640. Unfortunately, with no end in immediate sight for the AI industry's demands for both storage and RAM , price increases at this scale are likely to become infuriatingly common. Consumers are going to need to get creative to escape this new normal.
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