Samsung launches super-fast M.2 SSD with PCIe 5.0
Samsung has taken its time with its first real PCIe 5.0 SSD. The 9100 Pro now promises high speed with low power consumption.
(Image: Samsung)
With the SSD 9100 Pro, Samsung presents its first real SSD with PCI Express 5.0. After years of holding back on PCIe 5.0, Samsung is now getting started: The SSD 9100 Pro uses four fast PCIe lanes and is said to achieve 14.8 GB/s when reading and 13.4 GB/s when writing, making the 9100 Pro currently the fastest PCIe SSD for the M.2 slot. The SSD also promises a lot when it comes to accessing random addresses: the 4 TByte version of the 9100 Pro is said to achieve a whopping 2.2 million IOPS when reading, and even 2.6 million when writing. The smaller models are slightly below these figures in individual disciplines, but you won't notice any differences in practice.
According to the data sheet, the maximum power consumption is a maximum of 9 watts. This is on a par with the 5.0 controller SM2508 from Silicon Motion, which is advertised as particularly energy-efficient. Samsung claims an increase in power consumption of 2.5 watts with double the performance compared to the SSD 990 Pro.
Late to the party
The first SSDs with PCIe 5.0 came onto the market almost two years ago: The Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10000 achieved, as the name suggested, 10 GByte/s read speeds. Like many of its successors, it used the Phison E26 controller, which, apart from its high speed, was known above all for its power-hungry performance.
For years, however, Samsung held back with the 5.0 SSDs. With the SSD 990 Evo and 990 Evo Plus from last year, the controller was able to use two PCIe 5.0 lanes (as an alternative to PCIe 4.0 x4), but this was only sufficient for a maximum of 7.3 GByte/s – no competition for the now established 5.0 range of competitors.
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Inner workings
As is usual with Samsung SSDs, the SSD 9100 Pro only uses components manufactured in-house on the circuit board: controller, flash and DRAM cache all come from the company itself. It is also usual for Samsung to provide little information about the controller. It uses a 5-nanometer process and is codenamed Presto.
For the flash, Samsung relies on the eighth generation of its own V-NAND memory. This has 236 or 238 layers, depending on the source, and mass production has already been running for two years. Part of the three-bit TLC memory is always switched to single-bit SLC mode for write acceleration. Depending on the occupancy of the SSD, another dynamic part is added – Samsung calls the technology TurboWrite, others simply SLC cache. The endurance is 600 TByte per TByte of storage space and the warranty period is five years.
Samsung is launching three versions and two variants: 1, 2 and 4 TByte capacities, all appearing with and without heat sinks. In the third quarter, Samsung plans to add an 8 TByte version, again with and without a heat sink. According to the manufacturer, the heat sink versions also fit into the Playstation 5.
The SSDs will be available from March 18. Samsung has not yet named any prices, we will add them here when they become available.
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