The Samsung 9100 PRO NVMe SSD is the fastest SSD on the market, beating out even enterprise-grade hardware. With up to 14.6GB/s transfer speeds, who is this SSD really even for? The answer may surprise you.

Price and Availability

The Samsung 9100 PRO NVMe SSD comes in four sizes: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. It also comes in two versions, with or without a heatsink. The price is $199.99 for 1TB, $299.99 for 2TB, $549.99 for 4TB. The heatsink adds $20 to each drive. The 8TB pricing is yet to be announced, but is slated to be released in Q2 of 2025.

Just How Fast Is This Thing?

The Samsung 9100 PRO NVMe SSD is actually the fastest NVMe SSD on the market today. Previously, that crown was held by the Crucial T705, which has a theoretical maximum read/write speed of 14.5GB/s and 12.7GB/s respectively.

The Samsung 9100 PRO has a theoretical maximum of 14.7GB/s read, and 13.4GB/s write. In my testing with CrystalDiskMark, I was able to achieve speeds of 14.72GB/s read, and 13.48GB/s write. Slightly under the theoretical maximum read, but a good bit past the theoretical maximum write.

This puts the Samsung 9100 PRO above even data center storage drives, which max out at 14GB/s with the Micron 9550. In other words, this drive is very fast.

The throughput for smaller sequential reads is barely affected, and the random reads and writes for smaller files are almost as fast as the sequential performance of NVMe SSDs from just a few years ago!

I want to put the speed in perspective for you. Standard platter hard drives, like the ones that ran computers for decades, maxed out at around 550MB/s read/write speeds when looking at the latest dual-actuator drive designs from companies like Seagate. SATA-based SSDs max out at around 550MB/s read/write speeds as well.

This SSD is over 27 times faster than a SATA SSD or the fastest mechanical drives in existence. I’m honestly blown away at these numbers, especially because of how small NVMe drives are.

What’s All That Speed Good For?

Now that I’ve covered just how fast this drive is, is there even a reason for all that speed? The answer may surprise you.

This SSD isn’t geared toward gamers, it’s not geared toward general users, it’s not even really geared toward most enthusiasts. This SSD is very purpose-built for a few tasks.

Samsung’s primary use case for this drive is AI workloads. It’ll handle the rapid transfer of data required for those workloads fantastically. Being the fastest drive on the market, there’s nothing else better for intense AI workloads.

It’ll also be an absolutely fantastic drive for those who do ultra-high-quality video editing, like 8K RAW footage. This drive would be great for photographers shooting with the newer high-res cameras, like those that capture 50MP+ uncompressed RAW photos.

But, outside those use cases, there’s not really a reason to have this drive over, say, a slightly slower one.

Is the Fastest NVMe Drive Available Actually Necessary?

Since I don’t shoot 8K RAW footage, and my camera just captures 24MP RAW photos, I couldn’t really test those edge-case workflows. Instead, I used this drive for what most people use NVMe drives for: gaming.

While it’s a great drive for gaming, there’s just no performance gains to be had, making it almost unnecessary for most games (for now).

My test system comprised of a Ryzen 9 7900X, 16GB of DDR5 at 6000MHz, and the EVGA FTW3 Ultra RTX 3080 12GB GPU. I tested Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 at 1080p on the extreme preset with DLSS set to quality. I didn’t want to test at 4K because I wanted the GPU to be able to really push as many frames as possible to know whether the storage was a bottleneck.

In my testing, the Samsung 9100 PRO achieved an average frame rate of 128 FPS. A Crucial T700 (in a PCIe Gen 4 slot, so at PCIe Gen 4 speeds), achieved the exact same 128 FPS. And, lastly, the WD_BLACK SN750, a PCIe Gen 3 drive, achieved 129 FPS. The single FPS difference here I think can be chalked up to margin of error.

All that said, there’s zero difference between using a PCIe Gen 3 SSD, or a PCIe Gen 5 SSD when it comes to gaming. However, I do want to say that this is just the case right now. In the future, we could absolutely see better frame rates from faster storage.

Likewise, you’re not going to see any difference between this and a last-generation drive when it comes to asset streaming in games. So no pop-in or other visual differences should exist between these drives.

What could be affected are loading times. So I decided to install a few games, and then manually time how long it took clicking “load level” to being in-game. I used The Outer Worlds, Black Ops 6, and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to measure load times.

As you can see, it made barely a susceptible difference, and in BLOPS 6 the 9100 was even marginally slower for some reason, but with no practical difference. However, most games on PC are not optimized for these fast NVMe SSDs. Future games are going to use APIs like Microsoft DirectStorage to make full use of next-gen drives. To get a preview of what that means, I ran the Bulk Load Demo and here you can see the 9100 absolutely smashing the competition.

In other words, the gaming potential is there, but it’s too far ahead of the curve.

Should You Buy the Samsung 9100 Pro NVMe SSD?

It’s tough to recommend (or not recommend) the Samsung 9100 PRO NVMe SSD.

On the one hand, it’s the fastest NVMe SSD on the market today, which is awesome for so many reasons. It’s great for AI-heavy workloads and other tasks that require ultra-fast read and write speeds.

On the other hand, it gives little-to-no practical performance gains for the vast majority of users over PCIe Gen 4 drives, which are about half the cost.

At the end of the day, it comes down to whether or not you think you’ll benefit from the extra speed. This drive is absolutely blazing fast, and I love having access to these read and write speeds for when I have workflows that could benefit from those types of tasks. However, I feel that this speed will be lost on most of my usage.

If you need the speed, then this drive is absolutely worth it. This is the fastest drive on the market, after all.

However, if you can get away with a slightly slower drive, then I recommend going that route for now. While the Samsung 9100 PRO NVMe SSD costs $300 at launch for 2TB of storage, I’d recommend that you instead pick up the Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB NVMe SSD (which I absolutely loved in my review) for just $250, doubling your storage, though your transfer speeds will be cut in half.