Many people swear by Samsung’s SSDs as the best ones out there, but the company has been fashionably late to the PCIe 5.0 game—maybe because, for a lot of things, PCIe 4.0 is still enough. Still, if you’ve been waiting for one, they’re finally here.

Samsung has just announced the 9100 PRO Series SSDs, what could be considered the company’s very first PCIe 5.0 SSD. It’s really fast, as it’s capable of reaching up to 14,800/13,400 MB/s sequential read/write speeds—as expected, almost twice as much those from comparable PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

It’s Not Samsung’s First Attempt, But It’s Its First Good One

This is not really a new technology, as we’ve had PCIe 5.0 hardware and even SSDs for months, if not years. But the keen-eyed among you might be confused—didn’t Samsung already release a PCIe 5.0 SSD? This is, as a matter of fact, not its first PCIe 5.0 SSD. The company’s previous attempt, the Samsung 990 EVO, came a few months ago, but that one wasn’t full PCIe 5.0.

The Samsung 9100 PRO leverages the full bandwidth of PCIe 5.0 x4, resulting in significantly faster read and write speeds. The Samsung 990 EVO, on the other hand, can operate in either PCIe 4.0 x4 or PCIe 5.0 x2 mode. This means that while it supports PCIe 5.0, it doesn’t utilize its full potential—you don’t get a full four lanes of PCIe 5.0, and the performance of two lanes is, effectively, what would be the full performance of four PCIe 4.0 lanes.

That’s good for cost-cutting, but not ideal if you want to squeeze the full performance out of the drive. And at that point, you might as well just buy a proper PCIe 4.0 drive—you’re not really gaining a bandwidth advantage by using PCIe 5.0 with that one, and PCIe 5.0 is backwards compatible with PCIe 4.0 like all other PCI Express generations are. By using a full four lanes of PCIe 5.0, the Samsung 9100 PRO manages to be a much faster drive.

Why Is It Worth It?

As we mentioned before, the 9100 PRO has sequential read speeds of up to 14,800 MB/s and write speeds of up to 13,400 MB/s, which is double the speed offered by its predecessors. Random read/write speeds are also improved, reaching up to 2,200K/2,600K IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). These speed increases should drastically reduce loading times for large files, applications, and games.

The drive also utilizes a new 5nm controller, consuming up to 49% less power than the previous generation. And it’s also available with a heatsink, which is something you’ll probably want especially if you plan to get a higher-storage model. Speaking of which, we have higher storage drives here. There’s a version that goes all the way up to a whopping 8TB. It’s not a size we haven’t seen before in NVMe SSDs, but it’s the first time Samsung launches an NVMe SSD this large. While it will probably come at a pretty penny, you can have a lot of lightning-fast storage on your computer with this one, if that’s something you need.

The 9100 PRO SSD and the 9100 PRO with Heatsink will, at first, be available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, starting this March. Prices start at $199.99 for the 1TB 9100 PRO and $219.99 for the 1TB 9100 PRO with Heatsink, varying depending on capacity and heatsink option. It’s as fast as an SSD can get right now, and I don’t think it’s something many people actually need (PCIe 4.0 is still really good), but if you have money to spare and your motherboard takes PCIe 5.0 SSDs, you might as well. Samsung plans to release the larger 8TB model later this year, so if you’re waiting for that specific storage tier, you’ll need to wait a tad longer.

Source: Samsung