Samsung's slower version of the 990 Pro SSD costs way more than the original

That’s just great.

Samsung

In 2022, Samsung introduced its 990 Pro series of solid state drives. At the time, these SSDs promised pretty impressive speeds and power for heavy-duty use cases, and they were available for $179 in a 1TB size or $309 for 2TB.

Fast forward to today, as Samsung announces a new, non-Pro model addition to this solid state drive lineup. Thanks to the soaring component costs of 2026, Samsung's 990 SSD will now run you $270 for 1TB and a staggering $530 for 2TB. And the real kicker: it's slower than the original 990 Pro model from 2022. The 2026 version promises sequential read and write speeds maxing out at 7,250 MB/s and 6,450 MB/s, while the random read and write speeds cap out at 850K and 1,200K input/output operations per second. The original SSD from 2022 had sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s and random read and write speeds of up to 1,400K and 1,550K input/output operations per second.

Barring typos in the press announcement we received, that's slower performance for a 50 percent higher cost. The 990 Pro SSD hasn't escaped price hikes either. The 1TB model now costs $320 and the 2TB has more than doubled its initial price at $640. Unfortunately, with no end in immediate sight for the AI industry's demands for both storage and RAM, price increases at this scale are likely to become infuriatingly common. Consumers are going to need to get creative to escape this new normal.