Something to look forward to: Samsung’s solid-state drives regularly rank among the best, but all of the company’s consumer NVMe drives have stopped at a maximum capacity of 2TB – until now. Consumers will soon have another 4TB option from a top manufacturer as SSD prices continue to fall.

Samsung recently confirmed plans to release a 4TB variant of its popular 990 Pro solid-state drive. The release date and price are still unknown, but the product marks the company’s entrance into the market for fast, high-capacity consumer drives.

The new variant – labeled MZ-V9P4T0BW – will be a PCIe 4.0 SSD with the same performance as its 2TB predecessor, likely approaching sequential read speeds of 7.5 GB/s and write speeds of about 7 GB/s. Samsung also confirms read and write IOPs of 1,400K and 1,550K, respectively. The 4TB 990 Pro will likely be a good choice for storing a large collection of games on a PlayStation 5 or PC.

You wanted it so badly, we had no choice but to deliver. The 4TB 990 PRO by #SamsungSSD is coming. Same blazing-fast storage with double the max capacity for gaming, video, 3D editing, and more. Stay tuned for more details. pic.twitter.com/B3iRso9Q3p

– Samsung Semiconductor (@SamsungDSGlobal) August 24, 2023

More users may start looking for 4TB drives as prices decline and significant game releases consume ever more space. Baldur’s Gate 3, Starfield, and Forza Motorsport each require around 130GB. Other upcoming titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Alan Wake II could carry similar storage demands.

Although Samsung hasn’t yet provided a price, other available 4TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives range between roughly $170 and $350. A 4TB 990 Pro will likely land close to the latter, assuming it maintains the 2TB version’s current lowest price of eight and a half cents per gigabyte. Furthermore, including a heatsink usually raises an SSD’s price, but the 2TB 990 Pro is strangely cheaper with its integrated heatsink. It isn’t clear how the current SSD market climate could impact the company’s decision on the upcoming model.

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Oversupply in the NAND flash space has dragged prices for 1TB and 2TB SSDs downward throughout the year, and the trend could continue through September, but 4TB drives have seen much less fluctuation. One exception is MSI’s Spatium M461, which has lost $50 on its price tag since April.

Another arena Samsung has yet to enter concerns PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs. Products using the new standard from companies like Crucial and Gigabyte advertise read speeds topping 10 GB/s, but the market for them is still in its early stages. Competitors like Samsung and Western Digital will likely introduce their offerings when PCIe 5.0 motherboards become more common.