Real world comparison: Samsung 980 OEM vs 990 SSD
Are you willing to spend almost P20,000 for an SSD? Let’s bite the bullet!
I’m playing the latest demo of Gear of War: E-Day, a highly engaging 3rd person shooter from the ‘Gears’ franchise that I grew up with. It’s technically free on Gamepass and the weekend preview was something I really wanted to get into with my friends. Thankfully despite the limited window for playtesting (it was a technical playtest for a weekend and a few days) I got to play half a dozen rounds with randoms and part of my regular gaming group.
Games are getting bigger on the hard drives. Especially ones like GoW. Although brief, I’ve included it in my rotation of other games like Palworld (we are running it on a dedicated server with my friends) and Rainbow Six: Siege, another game that I’ve been playing on and off since 2016.
Bite the bullet!
In the middle of the pandemic I had just upgraded my gaming PC into a SFF (small form factor) rig, the ASUS ROG NUC 970, a rather compact gaming desktop that’s roughly the size and weight of a cookbook from the 1980’s. One of the best features of this device is the inclusion of up to three additional NVME 2.0 drive slots. This is not much of a story about how I added a new drive for additional storage, but more about how these decisions are made, given many new realities about high-priced gaming rigs. It’s no secret that everything has gotten more expensive in the past few months. And we are not talking about video cards from the year 2020 due to the bitcoin mining hype. I’m referring to the state … of solid state drives and RAM due to the AI boom. Many analysts predict the 200-300% increase in pricing will stay in effect till 2028 or even till the turn of the decade. That being said, what happens if you need to buy new RAM or additional storage?
An opportunity to compare
My advice has always been if you got to do it, then you have to do it. Let’s bite the bullet. I just installed Samsung’s latest 990 SSD into the third NVME slot on my mini PC. I was a little surprised to see that my boot drive is actually a Samsung 980 but labeled as an OEM (original equipment manufacturer — the “stock” hardware that comes with every computer. This presented a rare opportunity to actually do some comparisons of a previous model with the current.
My current 1TB boot drive is a Samsung 980 Pro guised under its OEM name the PM9A1, the stock boot drive of the ASUS ROG NUC 970, which was released in 2024. This was actually a display model which meant that I was able to get it at a really good price (display units are the best!). This comes from the fact that it already has 32GB of DDR5 RAM onboard – a boon that you won’t see often in 2026 devices due to the component price increases.
The main differences between my boot drive and this 2TB Samsung 990 SSD are the read / write speeds, the controller, and the onboard architecture. The 990 SSD is obviously faster as it is newer, with up to 7,250 MB/s read and 6,450 MB/s write speeds. The 980 holds its own but has slightly slower speeds at up to 7,000 MB/s read and 5,100 MB/s write.
Numbers are numbers but in real life you won’t notice this difference. I’ve probably owned three other Samsung hard drives in my lifetime – adding these two would make it four and five and it’s come to the point where I have my old PC’s hard drive extracted into an enclosure somewhere in storage. The PC has left this world, but the 5400 rpm hard drive remained. Who knows what’s inside — probably my ripped MP3 files from my CD collection.
It’s also quite telling that my OEM drive is at 98% health for a 2024 device having been powered on 622 times with more than 800 hours running. That’s with 60 unsafe shutdowns (I had to manually reboot or the power died) and with a total of 52TB read and almost 15 TB write. Zero media errors. That’s a pretty good take on what I can expect with this new drive as the previous generation model holds its own.
Although the 990 series can be used as a boot drive, its architecture is mainly used for a secondary storage drive because it doesn’t have a DRAM cache built in (it uses a 64MB host memory buffer), compared to my previous drive. However, this isn’t such a big deal and to the regular user, you won’t feel any difference in functionality or performance. I believe it is more of a cost-saving measure. I mean, these drives are experiencing 300% surges in price. So it was a practical choice to go this route.
Breaking the bank needs to be worth it
Of note, the 990 comes with a PiccoloQ controller which helps push heat management even further than my boot drive. I think, overall, we are looking at a brand that has a very good reputation for lasting long. If you’re ever in the need to break the bank account for a new drive, I believe this 2TB model will last you through the current RAM crisis and beyond. I was lucky to have a point of comparison to see actual wear and tear – and that’s with my boot drive. If this was a secondary storage, it would not succumb to as much heat.
