Samsung is giving finishing touches to the SSD 990, a new upcoming M.2 NVMe Gen 4 SSD taking up the value end of the company's client SSD lineup. The 990 is not to be confused with the 990 EVO Plus, which was the company's DRAMless performance-segment SSD for PCIe Gen 4 generation. What segments the new 990 from the 990 EVO Plus is probably the NAND flash type (QLC vs. TLC), and an updated controller on the 990. While the 990 EVO Plus came with a Gen 4 x4 or Gen 5 x2 interface, the 990 is squarely Gen 4 x4. References to the Samsung 990 briefly surfaced on Samsung's Canadian website, before being removed, but VideoCardz grabbed some screenshots.

The Samsung 990 is, predictably, a DRAMless drive, which uses an in-house controller from Samsung. The drive is noted as offering lower write endurance than the 990 PRO, which uses a DRAM cache, and 3D TLC NAND flash, so it's possible that the drive uses QLC NAND flash. The 1 TB model is shown offering 400 TBW write endurance, while the 2 TB variant offers 800 TBW. In terms of performance, both variants offer sequential transfer speeds in the upper band of PCIe Gen 4 era, with up to 7250 MB/s sequential reads for the 2 TB variant, up to 7150 MB/s for the 1 TB variant; and both variants offering up to 6450 MB/s sequential writes.