Samsung 990 Evo is the world's first hybrid PCIe 4.0 / PCIe 5.0 SSD

Samsung announced the release of a new NVMe 990 Evo featuring a unique configuration of PCIe lines and 500 MB/sec and 4200 MB/sec read and write speed.

What’s special about the new device is PCIe 5.0 support on 2 lines which equals 4 PCIe 4.0 lines also available on the drive. The exact motivation of this configuration isn’t clear yet, since the PCIe 4.0 lines are fully capable of performing their tasks in PCIe 5.0 slots. A possible usage case is when only a 2-line channel is available, halving the bandwidths of PCIe 4.0 lines, from 8000 MB/sec to 4000 MB/sec, whereas PCIe 5.0 lines preserve their bandwidth.

The pricing of the new SSD drives hasn’t been announced yet.