Today, Samsung has sent over their brand new 9100 PRO 2TB Gen5 NVMe SSD for review. From the beginning of the SSD revolution with SATA SSDs, Samsung was a market leader in the consumer space. They held an edge during the SATA generation, and their 970 EVO product was a leader during the advent of NVMe SSDs. For Gen4, while Samsung did have a product in the 980 PRO and 990 PRO, they did not distinguish themselves in the same way as the brand to beat. Releases from WD, Sabrent, and others were able to perform at around the same level as Samsung’s drives, and often arrived to market before Samsung’s offerings. Now for Gen5, Samsung is again relatively late to market, so the question is whether they can stand out from the crowd in terms of performance. Can they can recapture that “Samsung magic” and reclaim their former title as best SSD in the world. With that hyperbolic introduction, let’s get to the review!
Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD
The Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
The 9100 PRO is available both with and without a heatsink, and my test drive is the bare drive model. Samsung has a pretty high level of vertical integration with this drive. They make the controller, which is named Presto, and they make the 236-layer TLC NAND. Samsung has always equipped SSDs with in-house controllers, rather than using an off-the-shelf part from Phison or Silicon Motion, which is one of the distinguishing characteristics for their drives. As a high-end Gen5 drive, the 9100 PRO comes equipped with a LPDDR4X DRAM cache.
The backside of the Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB contains nothing but a silkscreened logo and a sticker.
Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB SSD Specs
The Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB is available between 1TB and 4TB capacity points for now, with 8TB drives coming later.
The 2TB model is rated for 14700 MB/s sequential read and 13400 MB/s write. These numbers ever so slightly edge out the previous Gen5 performance leader, the Crucial T705. Samsung is targeting the very top-end of Gen5 performance, which is exciting. One small note is that Samsung has finally decided to use the industry term “TLC” instead of trying to pass their NAND off as “3bit MLC” as they have in previous generations, which I see as a positive improvement.
Endurance is rated at 1200 TBW, which is right in line for a 2TB drive, and the warranty is 5-years. Both of these are essentially the industry standard for a high end drive, which is good to see, and Samsung is obviously an old and well-known brand.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD and confirms we are operating at PCIe 5.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 2.0.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR5-6000 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. This slot supports up to PCIe Gen 5 x4. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data, and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
Nice results!
I’m kind of curious what a hyper-fast PCIe 5.0 device like this would look like in a PCIe 4.0 slot. Would it get ~identical read and write speeds (as it’s clearly capable of much higher rates than PCIe 4.0 can provide), or would it end up looking similar to high-end PCIe 4.0 devices, still with reads higher than writes?
Hopefully this one doesn’t go down to 1GB/s after 2 seconds of use like the 990 Pro.