The Samsung SSD 9100 PRO 1TB is Samsung’s fastest NVMe consumer SSD, and the company has used all four PCIe 5.0 lanes for the first time. Read speeds are up to 14,800 MB/s and write speeds are up to 13,400 MB/s. That’s approximately twice that of its predecessor, the Samsung 990 PRO. The SSD is in M.2 2280 form, so it can be placed directly into the motherboard, and it’s backed by a five-year warranty. Endurance at this capacity is rated for 600 terabytes written.
Head over to Amazon to get the Samsung SSD 9100 PRO 1TB for just $250, down from its usual price of $340. That’s a $90 discount and 26% off.
A sizable hard drive to store all your extra documents
Every SSD connects to your motherboard over PCIe lanes, and each generation of PCIe roughly doubles how much data can move through those lanes at once. Most drives you can buy today are still on Gen 4. This one’s on Gen 5 and uses all four lanes, which is why the numbers are twice what you’d see from a Gen 4 drive. Samsung pitches it at AI work, 4K video rendering, and gaming, since those are the situations where you’re actually waiting on the drive rather than the processor.
Sequential speed gets the headlines, but random performance is what you notice while you’re using the computer, because most of what a machine does all day is thousands of small reads and writes instead of one giant file transfer. The 9100 PRO handles 2.2 million IOPS reading and 2.6 million writing, and Samsung says those numbers aren’t possible without Gen 5.
Samsung built its own controller for this drive, called Presto, on a 5nm process with five ARM cores inside, and paired it with V-NAND V8 flash. Samsung’s answer to the problem with Gen 5 drives getting hotter than Gen 4 drives was to build in power and thermal management rather than add an external heatsink like most other drives. The company developed its own controller for the drive, called Presto, using a 5nm ARM-based chip with five processor cores, and also used Samsung V-NAND V8 memory.
Backward compatibility means that the 9100 PRO will also work in a PCIe 4.0 or 3.0 slot on an older machine, but you won’t see Gen 5 speeds until your motherboard is updated. Capacities for this drive are available up to 8TB if a terabyte just isn’t enough. Samsung Magician runs the software side of things, covering firmware updates, drive health, and cloning a current Windows installation over to the new drive.
Installing it takes one M.2 slot, one screw, and about two minutes. Just check the slot you’re using first, because the Samsung SSD 9100 PRO 1TB comes in both a bare version and one with a heatsink, and this is the bare one. At $250 instead of $340, that’s $90 off a drive Samsung only released last year.
