The fastest gaming SSD is down to a historic low price for a 2TB model
The Samsung 990 Pro is a spec monster, and that's backed up by real-world performance.
The Samsung 990 Pro is the fastest SSD we've ever tested - and now the 2TB model is discounted. This debuted at £284, but now has dropped to £240, a historic low price for this record-setting drive that pushes to the limits of the PCIe 4.0 spec.
The Samsung 990 Pro is our current top 'fastest SSD' pick, offering the shortest loading times of any drive we've tested. That's down not to its sequential read and write times, though these are impressive at 7450MB/s and 6900MB/s respectively, but its random read and write specs which are just ludicrous - up to 1.4M IOPS for reads and up to 1.55M IOPS for writes.
(For context, one of the fastest SATA SSDs, Samsung's 870 Evo, offers up less than 0.1M IOPS, while their last popular PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive, the 970 Pro managed up to 0.5M IOPS. The relatively recent 980 Pro, a PCIe 4.0 drive, went up to the 1.0M mark, but to get more than half a million IOPS more over the same PCIe 4.0 connection is incredible!)
In the official RPS write-up, James described the Samsung 990 Pro as having "exceptional read speeds in both light and heavy loading/copying tasks, and record-setting gaming performance." The full Samsung 990 Pro review adds more detail, underscoring the ludicrous speed of this drive.
The WD SN850x is its closest rival, with the Samsung drive holding the performance crown but the SN850x normally being offered at a cheaper price. For context, the SN850x is £227 for the same 2TB size without a heatsink, but I'd be tempted to go for the Samsung drive if you're going to spend £200+ anyway - what's another £13 to get the very best?
I'm curious to hear what you think though - so do let me know in the comments below! And don't worry; even though it's fun to look at deals on the cutting edge, we'll still have plenty of coverage of more affordable drives too - stay tuned.