Before starting our tests, we have to state something that came up during our tests with our test system. The ASUS ROG Strix X570-E Gaming motherboard includes 2 x M.2 Socket 3 with M Key Type 2242/2260/2280/22110 storage devices support (PCIe 4.0 and SATA modes). The first one is close/under the GPU while the second is at the end of the motherboard. From our testing the best performance for both Samsung NVME drives came from testing the drives at the first NVME slot, while at the second we did noticed a drop in speeds (with both NVME SSDs installed). No idea why this happens, just to let you know if you don't see the exact same performance you would expect from the Samsung 990Pro.

See the below results, they came from the same Samsung 990Pro 1TB drive, same Windows installation, just different NVME slot.

The Samsung Magician v7.0 offers a quick look of the drive's performance.

• The 990 Pro 1TB reaches 7.450B/s reading and 6.754GB/sec writing speeds.

• On the other side the 980 Pro 1TB reached 7.023GB/sec with 5.227GB/sec writing speed. The Random Read IOPS are higher at the Samsung 990Pro 1TB, while the Random Write IOPS are "better" at the Samsung 980Pro 1TB NVME.

The AJA Test System show a quick overview of the drive's reading/writing speed

• Samsung 990Pro 1TB: we got 6.066GB/sec writing and 6.085GB/sec reading.

• Samsung 980Pro 1TB: we got 4.455GB/sec writing and 5.565GB/sec reading.

Passing to a more well-known benchmark, the ATTO Disk Benchmark shows the performance with various file sizes from 0.5Kb, 1Kb, 2Kb up to 8192MB file sizes...

The Samsung 990Pro 1TB seems overall to have a leading edge in reading

and writing, as it seems there seems to be an in-compatibility of the Samsung 980Pro 1TB that leads to reduced writing speeds after 64kb sized files...

Passing to the newest ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01.0F1, again both drives are neck to neck and after 256kb, the Samsung 990Pro 1TB takes a big lead in reading performance.

, while at the writing part, the Samsung 990Pro 1TB takes a clean win in almost all file sizes, with a big performance after 64kb sized files.

Passing to more real life tests, the Samsung 990Pro 1TB has better writing performance, or we should say more consistence. Below are the results we got after copying with TerraCopy from one NVME to the other and via versa.

We understand that the Samsung 980Pro 1TB results are "better" than the Samsung 990Pro, since all the written data were feed from the Samsung 990Pro, which has better reading performance. When we read data from the Samsung 980Pro 1TB to the Samsung 990Pro 1TB, there is a small delay/lower performance that leads to lower overall writing performance.

Getting some more information about the drive's Temperature/Performance from HWInfo64 software. The 990Pro 1TB seems to reach a max of 67 Celsius under our stress test, as the Samsung Magician indicates. The HWInfo64 has reported three sensors with up to 77 Celsius, which may be wrong. Note that the drive has the stock Asus motherboard NVME heatsink that helps reduce heat..

The Samsung 980Pro 1TB at the other hand, showed slight lower temperatures, up to 65 Celsius.