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    REVIEW: Up your storage capacity – Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD

    With Christmas around the corner and Black Friday sales at every turn, you might be thinking it’s time to upgrade your computer storage. Let’s face it, one can never have too much storage, right? If you’re wanting a few extra terabytes to play with, look no further than a solid state drive (SSD). Better yet, look for an M.2 card.

    These small form factor cards are the perfect space savers whilst giving you lots of space. They are easy to install, and most motherboards have several slots available.

    I wanted to upgrade the storage on my PC so I got my hands on the new Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD. Here’s how easy it is to set up, get running, and some of my thoughts around the new drive.

    Unboxing

    If you love a good unboxing, you might be a little underwhelmed when it comes to unboxing any M.2 SSD. These cards are so small and thin that there really isn’t anything to unbox. The Samsung 990 EVO Plus box comes with the card and a quick start guide, so you might want to hold off on the unboxing videos. But that’s all you need. A brand new 2TB SSD to up your PC storage.

    Samsung 990 Evo Plus drive out of the box. It is about a 10th the box of the box.
    Out of the box you’ll receive the drive, and an installation guide. (Photo: TechAU)

    Once you have taken a whole 10 seconds to take your card out of the box, you can go ahead and install it.

    Installing the Samsung 990 EVO Plus

    Depending on your PC setup, this can be a quick and easy process, or a long and annoying one. Installing M.2 cards into a motherboard itself is very straightforward. Most motherboards these days don’t even require you to use a screw since many manufacturers use a quick clip. It should only take you around five seconds to slot in an M.2 card into your motherboard. Accessing the slot can be another matter entirely.

    Samsung 990 EVO Plus drive installed in Motherboard, right middle. There are two other M.2 drives shown in the picture.
    Samsung 990 EVO Plus installed in my motherboard. It’s easy to pick out the new drive! (Photo: TechAU)

    I have a rather beefy computer with a bunch of really cool mounts, and a liquid cooling system. This means accessing my motherboard is a little more difficult than a stock standard PC. Not only is the computer heavy and thus harder to move, I also have to remove graphics card mount brackets and a thermal guard. In addition, I need to maneuver around the cooling pipes. Still, even with a bit of unscrewing and fiddling with parts, the total install time was around ten minutes. Once I have access to the M.2 slot, it took around two seconds to click in the Samsung 990 EVO Plus drive. Thus, your full installation time will depend on the computer and motherboard you have.

    Close up inside a PC with some RGB  fans, and large Perspex GPU bracket mount, cooling pipe in the corner and motherboard in the background.
    To access the motherboard in my computer, you need to work your way around GPU mount brackets, cooling piles, and behind the motherboard thermal plate. (Photo: TechAU)

    Once installed, it’s time to turn your computer on.

    Accessing the Samsung 990 EVO Plus

    With your new Samsung SSD installed, you have access to more storage, but probably not immediately. If you head to your computer settings (on Windows 11 it’s called “This PC”) you probably won’t see your new SSD appear under “Devices and drives”. Don’t panic! Hard drives need to be initialised before they can be utilised.

    If you’re worried about whether or not you’ve installed your SSD correctly, and whether the computer is picking it up, you can check a couple of things. The easiest is the Samsung Magician software. It was super easy to grab this from the website and install it. After installation is complete, it immediately shows you all the drives connected to your computer.

    Screenshot of Samsung Magician showing the Samsung SSD 990 EVO Plus 2TB detected.
    Samsung Magician has detected the drive. (Screenshot by TechAU)

    This is a very handy piece of tech that’s helpful in many other ways. We’ll come back to that in a minute. You can also check “Device Manager” (on Windows PCs) to ensure your SSD is detected under “Disk drives”. If your drive has been detected under one of these, then you’re good to continue. If not, then you’ll need to turn off your computer and re-install the drive correctly.

    Screenshot of Device Manager showing 7 disk drives, with one of those being the Samsung SSD 990 EVO Plus 2TB.
    Device Manager showing the list of devices I have installed and detected. (Screenshot by TechAU)

    Formatting and using your Samsung 990 EVO Plus

    Now onto initilising and formatting your drive. This step needs to be performed so that your drive can be formatted as a file system, otherwise you can’t store data. You can format the drive in two ways. The first is through Samsung Magician. If you go through this tool, under “Drive Management”, you’ll be redirected to Windows “Disk Management”. Alternatively, you can go directly to Disk Management by typing “disk”, and selecting “Create and format hard disk partitions”. From here, you’ll be able to right click the unallocated space on your new drive and choose how to allocate the space.

    Screenshot of Disk Management showing 1863GB unallocated space.
    The disk is detected in “Disk Management” and the unallocated space can be formatted into one or more partitions. (Screenshot by TechAU)

    Since my drive is mainly going to be used for file storage, I can create one partition without too much worry. The 2TB Samsung 990 EVO Plus has plenty of room to create multiple partitions for things like boot drive, game drive, and data storage. I already have plenty of other drives for these purposes so I’m just using this one for storage. The Samsung 990 EVO Plus is one of the best performing drives around, so when I have more time, the best I can do for my PC is use the Samsung 990 EVO Plus for running software and games, and using other, older drives for storing data.

    Samsung Magician Software for management

    One of the things I love the most about the Samsung SSDs, is the Samsung Magician software. Whilst the software will detect all drives on my computer, the full features are only available for Samsung drives and supports all the newer drives. For example, Samsung Magician provides new all the same functionality for my Samsung SSD 830 Series. For the full device compatibility list, check out “Supported Models” on the Samsung Magician website.

    Screenshot of Samsung Magician showing Drive Health with 5GB written to the drive. Temperature is at a normal 45 deg C.
    Samsung Magician showing the Samsung SSD beginning to have data written to it. (Screenshot by TechAU)

    The Samsung Magician software provides me with a tonne of features for customising my drive. For example, I already mentioned this drive is (currently) mainly used for storage. Under “Performance Optimization” I can put my drive into “Standard Mode” or “Power Saving Mode”. This helps me optimise my computer, giving performance where it’s needed, and in this case saving a few dollars on my power bill. When I switch this to a game and/or Windows boot drive, then I’ll want to use full performance mode to prevent the hard drive from going into sleep mode.

    Screenshot of Samsung Magician showing the Performance Optimisation tab with "Power Saving Mode" enabled. TRIM Status enabled. Over provisioning enabled.
    I love that when I put my drive into “Power Saving Mode”, Samsung Magician switches to an aqua-green colour. (Screenshot by TechAU)

    Overall, this is a great piece of software that works with Samsung devices and allows me to tailor how I want to use each drive.

    Samsung 990 EVO Plus

    Installing and using the Samsung 990 EVO Plus has been a breeze. Now I want to switch all my drives to Samsung devices so I can use the Samsung Magician software to optimise exactly how I want to use each of my hard drives. The speed of the Samsung 990 EVO Plus has been perfect, copying around 1.3 TB data in less than an hour (yes the speed is also limited by the external drive I was copying from).

    This is the main drive which I’m loading all my video files for video editing and so far I have had zero problems with speed or accessibility. The hard drive has lived up to the hype and I’m glad I now have a much faster and more power efficient drive to use.

    Upgraded performance: Sequential read/write speeds of up to 7250/6300 MB/s, +45% improvement on the current 990 EVO.
    Image: Samsung

    If you want to purchase the Samsung 990 EVO Plus, or any Samsung SSD, you can do so directly from the Samsung website. With the Black Friday sales, some drives are $100 AUD off, with the Samsung 990 PRO 2TB SSD coming in at $279 AUD. There’s also the Samsung 990 PRO with heatsink for $389 AUD with 2TB storage. Since I already have a heatsink on my motherboard, I didn’t opt for this option. If you don’t have a heatsink already, this is a good one to consider in order to optimise the power and efficiency of your drive.

    You might even save a few cents on electricity. Otherwise if you want exactly what I’ve written about here, you can grab the Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2TB for $319 AUD. It’s currently sold out on the website, but you can pre-order or choose the 1TB drive for $195 AUD, or the 4TB drive for $629 AUD. There are plenty of options, so you’re sure to find the right drive and price if you’re wanting to boost your computer space. Happy shopping, and happy storage upgrading.

    Michelle Duke
    Michelle Dukehttps://mishmanners.info
    Mish is the Hackathon Queen, having participated in more than 100 events. Between being a Developer and Twitch streamer, Mish also finds time to pursue her keen interest in driving entrepreneurial culture in Melbourne's Melbourne’s esports industry and has founded several tech companies.

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