Samsung Launches 990 2TB QLC SSD at $529.99 as Review Flags 3-Year Warranty

Q: Is the Samsung 990's impressive endurance a real tech leap or a marketing trick tied to its shorter warranty?

It is both: a genuine improvement in QLC endurance, but also a number made to look stronger by the shorter warranty. Tom’s Hardware found the Samsung 990’s rated endurance unusually high for a budget QLC drive: 400TBW for 1TB and 800TBW for 2TB. That is better than many QLC rivals and points to real engineering gains. Samsung’s 286-layer V9 QLC NAND, stronger error correction, and its odd/even parity-style protection during writes are credible technical reasons the drive can tolerate more writes than older QLC designs. But the headline endurance figure also benefits from presentation. Samsung gives the 990 only a three-year warranty, not the more common five years. That matters because TBW is tied to the warranty window. Spread 400TB over three years and the allowed daily writes look much higher than if the same drive were covered for five years. In that sense, the endurance rating is not fake, but it is flattered by the shorter coverage period. The practical takeaway is that the 990 is not a breakthrough that suddenly makes QLC equal to TLC for heavy write workloads. It is still a DRAM-less budget SSD with weaker sustained-write behavior and only middling efficiency. For normal consumer use, game storage, and general-purpose PCIe 4.0 performance, the endurance is more than adequate. For write-intensive work, the shorter warranty and QLC design still make it a less reassuring choice than a good TLC drive.

3 articles · Updated · Tom's Hardware · Jul 14

Tom’s Hardware called Samsung’s new 990 a competent budget PCIe 4.0 QLC SSD, saying the 2TB model delivers acceptable all-around performance but only mediocre power efficiency.
The 2TB drive is rated for 7,250 MB/s reads, 6,450 MB/s writes and 850K/1.2M random IOPS, using a DRAM-less four-channel PiccoloQ controller and single-sided M.2 2280 design.
Samsung set MSRPs at $269.99 for 1TB and $529.99 for 2TB, prices the review said look high against cheaper rivals such as Crucial’s P310 and WD’s TLC-based SN7100.
Endurance stands out at 800 TBW for 2TB—about 400 TBW per TB—but the review said that stronger write rating is partly offset by a shorter 3-year warranty instead of the usual five.
The drive also showcases Samsung’s denser 286-layer V9 QLC NAND, which the review said points more to Samsung’s enterprise-focused flash roadmap than to a consumer performance breakthrough.