The Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD 4TB is an M.2 2280 NVMe drive with sequential reads up to 7,250 MB/s and writes up to 6,300 MB/s. Four terabytes holds roughly 16 current games at 250GB apiece, with room left for the operating system. It works in a PCIe 4.0 x4 connection or a PCIe 5.0 x2 connection, so it drops into older and newer motherboards alike. Samsung Magician software takes care of firmware and drive health once it’s in.

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An NVMe drive plugs straight into an M.2 slot and skips the SATA cable entirely. Most SSDs are wired for one PCIe generation, and that’s it. The 990 EVO Plus takes PCIe 4.0 x4 on an older board or PCIe 5.0 x2 on a newer one, and the speeds are the same either way. Build on a Gen 4 board now, swap the motherboard in two years, and the drive moves over without becoming the slow part.

A PC can read from a 990 EVO Plus at up to 7,250 MB/s and write to it at up to 6,300 MB/s. A 50GB game file would take around seven seconds to copy. Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 sets aside part of the drive as fast write cache, and the 4TB model gets a larger allocation than the 1TB and 2TB versions.