After the release of Samsung 990 EVO and 990 EVO Plus, everybody was looking for the real Gen 5.0 drive from Samsung. Well, in their recent news article, Samsung announced their Samsung 9100 Pro in two variants i.e. heatsink and without a heatsink.
In other words, the Crucial T705, Micron 4600, T-Force Cardea Z540, and other popular Gen 5.0 NVMe SSDs have got a new competitor. The theoretical read/write numbers from the 9100 Pro are shown to be higher than all the existing SSDs but the real results can be observed once the drive is in the market.
The new Samsung 9100 PRO series claims sequential read speeds of up to about 14,800 MB/s and write speeds of around 13,400 MB/s. In a similar performance bracket, the Crucial T705 (especially the 2TB model) can reach at around 14,500 MB/s read and around 12,600 MB/s write, making it one of the fastest consumer options. Will the Samsung 9100 take its place now? That is the question for the future.
Another notable thing is the capacity. The 9100 will have an 8TB variant which is surely a big advantage for a specific set of people who are always in the hunt for high-capacity drives. The drive will be based on the PCIe 5.0 generation utilizing the full bandwidth of 4 lanes with the software interface of NVMe 2.0. The in-house controller, as written in the official article, will be based on the 5nm technology. The company claims to boost efficiency by up to 49% with its help.
Pricing
The standard 9100 PRO models will be available (starting in March) with capacities of 1TB ($199.99), 2TB ($299.99), and 4TB ($549.99). The 8TB model is supposed to be released in the second half of 2025. The heatsink models follow similar pricing, slightly higher to account for the additional cooling feature. 9100 Pro is a little expensive compared to the existing Gen 5.0 drives like the Crucial T705 and Seagate Firecuda 540. However, if the users get a better performance, the market will surely accept the drive with open arms. Also, the brand name Samsung gives its drives the credibility and market value that other brands may not be able to give.
Specifications
9100 Pro will have the version V8 of their V-NAND in the TLC format. LPDDR4X cache memory is there with decent capacity i.e. 1GB in 1TB, 2GB in 2TB, 4GB in 4TB, and 8GB in 8TB.
If we look at the power consumption numbers, the 9100 Pro delivers around 50% improvement in performance per watt over the 990 Evo Plus. The TBW numbers are similar to the 990 EVO Plus.
The news of this new release from Samsung has ignited a widespread discussion on the internet. Well, we’ll have to wait until March before this drive arrives.