Samsung has announced its fastest consumer SSD to date, the 9100 Pro. The drive comes with some of the fastest PCIe Gen 5.0 transfer speeds, essentially making it useful for power users, gamers, and professionals who need high-speed storage for demanding workloads.
According to the company, the 9100 Pro offers sequential read speeds of up to 14,800MB/s sequential read speeds and 13,400MB sequential write speeds making it almost twice as fast as its predecessor, the 990 Pro. This makes it the fastest PCIe Gen 5 consumer SSD on the market. The only other drive that comes close is the Crucial T705 which offers read and write speeds of up to 14,500MB/s and 12,700MB/s respectively.
| Samsung 9100 Pro / 9100 Pro with heatsink | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Interface | PCIe 5.0 x4, NVMe 2.0 | ||||
| Form Factor | M.2 (2280) / M.2 (2280 with heatsink) | ||||
| Hardware | NAND | Samsung V NAND TLC (V8) | |||
| Controller | In-house controller | ||||
| Cache Memory | 1GB LPDDR4X | 2GB LPDDR4X | 4GB LPDDR4X | 8GB LPDDR4X | |
| Performance | Seq. Read/Write (MB/s) | 14,700 / 13,300 | 14,700 / 13,400 | 14,800 / 13,400 | 14,800 / 13,400 |
| Ran. Read/Write (IOPS, QD32) | 1,850K / 2,600K | 1,850K / 2,600K | 2,200K / 2,600K | 2,200K / 2,600K | |
| Power | Active (Read/Write) | 7.6W / 7.2W | 8.1W / 7.9W | 9.0W / 8.2W | TBD |
| Device Sleep (L1.2) | 4.0mW / 3.3mW | 4.8mW / 4.0mW | 6.5mW / 5.7mW | TBD | |
| Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 | 114GB | 226GB | 442GB | TBD | |
| Data Encryption | Class 0 (AES 256), TCG/Opal v2.0, MS eDrive (IEEE1667) | ||||
| Total Bytes Written (TBW) | 600 | 1,200 | 2,400 | 4,800 | |
| Warranty | Five years | ||||
The 9100 PRO SSD will be available next month starting at $200 for the base 1TB model. Samsung will also offer higher capacities including 2TB ($300) and 4TB ($550) while an 8TB capacity model is also in the pipeline which is expected to launch in the second half of 2025.
Beyond raw speeds, Samsung states that the 9100 Pro features an “advanced heat management system” which is essentially a heatsink since PCIe 5.0 SSDs tend to generate significant heat. The 1TB to 4TB models come with an 8.8mm-thick heatsink, while the 8TB variant includes a larger 11.25mm heatsink. The optional heatsink bumps up the price of the 9100 Pro by $20, which is not too bad.
Despite the impressive speeds, adoption of PCIe Gen 5 SSDs remains relatively low. PCIe Gen 4 and even Gen 3 drives already provide sufficient and stable performance for most everyday tasks, including high-resolution gaming. Additionally, not all motherboards support PCIe Gen 5 M.2 SSDs—compatibility is mostly limited to newer Intel and AMD platforms.
