Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

Launching a new SSD in the current hardware climate, even a simple, DRAMless, QLC-packing SSD like the Samsung 990, may seem like starting up a roof thatching business during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius: innocuous idea, apocalyptically bad timing.

The 990 itself also presents several reasons for steering clear. It’s the first drive in Samsung's current PCIe 4.0 series (which also counts the very good 990 Pro) to only offer a three-year warranty, instead of the standard five. It’s not particularly impressive in synthetic benchmarks, its random 8 queues/8 threads scores in CrystalDiskMark amounting to a budget-grade 2,878MB/s read speed and 3,974MB/s write speed. And, while Samsung are innocent until proven guilty on some matters, they’re bang to rights on charging £430 for the 2TB model when a 2TB 990 Pro (3,775MB/s reads and 4,261MB/s writes, for the record) is available for £289.

The 1TB 990, however, is £220 – still expensive, but much more competitive with older single-terabyters. Also, in a minor miracle, the 990 managed to pull out a mere 6.3s load time in our usual Shadow of the Tomb Raider test. That matches the all-time-low of WD’s PCIe 5.0-based Black SN8100, and narrowly beats both the 990 Pro and the WD Black SN850X (6.5s apiece) for good measure.

Having recently lost my main rig’s SSD to a catastrophic controller failure, I’m above-averagely loath to recommend a drive that only keeps you covered for three years. Let alone, one that that doesn’t achieve the general read and write speeds of existing alternatives. Still, this is a PC games website, not a copy-pasting files website, and the evidence points to the 990 being surprisingly, very specifically skilled at load time reduction. Just, stick to the 1TB model, yeah?

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Quick Kits is a hardware review series about pouring as much fully-tested PC gear knowledge down your eyes as we can – within two or three paragraphs.