In 2022, Samsung introduced its 990 Pro series of SSDs. At the time, these SSDs promised pretty impressive speeds and power for heavy-duty use cases, and they were available for $179 for a 1TB form factor or $309 for 2TB.
Fast forward to today, as Samsung announces a new non-Pro model addition to this SSD lineup. Thanks to soaring component costs in 2026, Samsung’s SSD 990 will now cost you $270 for 1TB and $530 for 2TB. And the real bonus: it’s slower than the original 990 Pro model from 2022. The 2026 version promises sequential read and write speeds peaking at 7,250 MB/s and 6,450 MB/s, while random read and write speeds top out at 850,000 and 1,200,000 input/output operations per second. The original 2022 SSD 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 1,400,000 and 1,550,000 input/output operations per second.
Barring any typos in the press release we received, this represents slower performance at 50% more cost. The SSD 990 Pro has not escaped the price increase either. The 1TB model now costs $320 and the 2TB has more than doubled its original price to $640. Unfortunately, with demand for storage and RAM from the AI industry not in immediate sight, price increases on this scale are likely to become extremely common. Consumers will need to get creative to escape this new normal.
