Samsung's new 990 SSD is slower and more expensive than its predecessor

Samsung has announced the addition of a new solid-state drive to its 900 series, this time a non-Pro version simply called the 990 SSD. The new drive is priced at $270 for the 1TB version and $530 for the 2TB version, which is considerably more than the original 990 Pro's launch prices in 2022 of $179 and $309, respectively.

What's more striking is that the new 990 SSD is slower than its predecessor. According to Samsung's official announcement, sequential read and write speeds top out at 7,250 MB/s and 6,450 MB/s, while random read and write speeds reach 850,000 and 1,200,000 IOPS. In comparison, the 2022 990 Pro achieved 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 1,400,000 and 1,550,000 IOPS.

The 990 Pro itself has not escaped price hikes either: the 1TB model now costs $320, and the 2TB version has more than doubled its original price to $640. Samsung attributes the price increases to soaring component costs, driven by the AI industry's growing demand for both storage and RAM. With no immediate end in sight, such scale of price increases is likely to become common, forcing consumers to find creative ways to adapt to the new normal.