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When the first consumer Gen 5 SSDs hit the market there was one major name missing from the list of companies offering drives – Samsung. The second generation of drives duly arrived and still nothing, then late last year Samsung launched the 990 EVO Plus (reviewed HERE) a drive that can run at PCIe Gen 4 x4 or PCIe Gen 5 x2 speeds… but there was still no full-blown Gen5 drive – until now.
The Samsung 9100 Pro is the company's first PCIe 5.0 x4 drive aimed at the consumer market with headline Sequential speeds of up to 14,800MB/s for reads and up to 13,400MB/s for writes (4TB drive).
It uses an in-house controller in combination with Samsung's 8th generation 236-layer 3-bit MLC (TLC) V-NAND. Details about the new Presto PCIe 5.0 x4 controller are thin on the ground but what we do know is that it's built on a 5nm process supporting 8 channels running at 2,400MT/s. Samsung claims the new 9100 Pro has a 49% improved power efficiency over the Gen 4 SSD 990 Pro but uses 2.5W more power than the older drive.
At launch, the drive comes in three capacities, 1TB, 2TB (the drive we are reviewing) and a 4TB model that is the current flagship drive, though an 8TB model is due in the 3rd quarter of 2025. It is available in two versions, plain and with a factory-fitted heatsink.
Samsung rates the Sequential performance of the 2TB drive as up to 14,700MB/s for reads and up to 13,400MB/s for writes. When we tested the drive with the ATTO benchmark, the best we saw from the drive was 13,690MB/s for reads and 12,6600MB/s for writes. Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 default benchmark we could confirm the official maximum figures with test results of 14,641MB/s for reads and 13,405MB/s for writes – the fastest Sequential speeds we've seen for a consumer Gen 5 drive to date using this benchmark.
When it came to 4K random performance, we couldn't get anywhere close to the official figures using our 4-threaded testing. Samsung quotes read/write figures for the 2TB drive of up to 1,850,000 IOPS and 2,600,000 IOPS respectively. With our standard 4-threaded tests the best we saw from the drive was 500,907 IOPS for reads and 461,228 IOPS for writes. In this test the drive has the fastest QD1 (97,154 IOPS), QD2 (189,444 IOPS) and QD4 (346,138 IOPS) read performance we've seen to date. Random write performance wasn't quite as impressive as the highest position it achieved in our results table was fourth at QD1 (268,424 IOPS).
The best performance figures we saw from the drive came from using the Peak Performance profile in Crystal Disk Mark 8 with reads (default) at 1,865,393 IOPS, confirming the official figure with best write result (compressed data) at 1,652,351 IOPS, way short of the official maximum.
The official random figures came from running the drive with a QD of 256 using 32 threads. We did a quick test using those parameters and with our test system, the best we saw was 1,853,968 IOPS for reads and 1,726,062 IOPS for writes.
To keep the drive cool in operation it uses a combination of the 5mm build process. a copper heat spreader built into the label on the rear of the drive, a nickel coating on the controller and Samsung’s DTG (Dynamic Thermal Guard) algorithm. The combination seems to work very well as sitting under the heatsink of the Gigabyte AORUS X670E Xtreme motherboard we used for testing, the hottest the drive got was during the CrystalDiskMark 8 0 fill Read test where it reached 46° C. For the bulk of our testing, the drive averaged 40° C with the 4K focussed tests averaging 35° C.
The 2TB Samsung SSD 9100 Pro is priced at $299.99.
Pros
- Overall performance.
- Thermal design.
- 5-year warranty.
Cons
- Tested 4K write performance couldn’t match the official maximum figures.
KitGuru says: We've waited a long, long time for Samsung to get a Gen 5 SSD into the consumer space and it's finally arrived in the shape of the 9100 Pro. It manages to combine fast performance and pretty good thermals, a neat trick considering this is a Gen 5 drive. Well worth the wait.
