Samsung 9100 Pro 2 TB SSD review

It's been 21 months since the first PCIe five drives arrived with us. 21 long months, since the Crucial T700, the Gigabyte Aorus, and similarly specced SSDs landed on our shores, delivering outstanding sequential performance, tiny fans, and eye-watering price tags to match. Since then we've seen iteration on iteration, price drop on price drop, and a continual stream of devices with improved efficiency pushing the limits of what can be achieved with the standard.

And yet, 21 months, without an answer from Samsung. For what reason, it's hard to really say. The brand was, without a doubt, incredibly dominant during the heyday of the PCIe 3.0 era, all those years ago. With the 960 Pro and Evoline, it delivered some seriously potent performance, all backed up by solid endurance and a hefty warranty too. Since then we've had a smattering of PCIe 4.0 solutions, some odd hybridized twin channel 5.0 drives, in the likes of the 990 Evo and Evo Plus, and that's about it. Nothing to write home about, at least until now.

At last, the Samsung 9100 Pro line has arrived, and oh boy, is there a lot to talk about? Alright, so perhaps that isn't the kindest intro for the poor blighter, certainly given its not the only brand out there that lacks a suitable 5.0 solution (here's looking at you, Western Digital, or should I say SanDisk?). But given its dominance so early on, creating some of the best SSDs around, I really expected it to deliver on this generation at launch. Not nearly two years later. Right now, it almost feels like we're at the end of the 5.0 line, with PCIe 6.0 on the horizon, and the 5.0 bandwidth limits, certainly for sequentials anyway, pretty much already being capped out midway through last year.

So what was the holdup? At a guess, controller and NAND development. The 9100 Pro, features the same 236-layer TLC V-NAND that Samsung used in its 990 Evo Plus line. It's an efficient NAND package, available in a maximum of 2 TB capacities, allowing the company to stack two of them on a single side to tap out at 4TB per side. It's chunky too—seriously big. Compare this to something like Kioxia's 218-layer BiCS8 found on Corsair's MP700 Elite, and the things just dwarf it in overall physical space. It's not an efficient design as far as space is concerned.

Samsung's also paired the 9100 with its own dedicated LPDDR4X cache memory. That comes in at around 1 GB per TB of total storage on the drive. From what we can tell from our own testing, that's backed up with a hefty 365 GB pseudo-SLC cache on the drive (or thereabouts) as well, at least for the 2 TB variant. Effectively, what this does, is allow the SSD's controller to rapidly read and write data to the TLC NAND using that combined cache as a speedy buffer. If it needs to dip into the flash it pivots to the larger, yet slightly higher-latency pseudo-SLC cache, to assist with the write transfers (TLC is notoriously slow at handling these kind of operations). Theoretically, it is possible to saturate that pSLC layer as well, but, you'd have to be shifting a considerable amount of data to really see those sequential performance numbers fall off.

Still, it's that controller that's finally given Samsung the capacity to launch a 5.0 drive at all. It's effectively built out of Sammy's own 5 nm manufacturing process, coupled with an eight-channel design, very similar to what we saw with the 990 Evo Plus and its predecessor, although of course with 5.0 connectivity instead.

As for capacities, we've got the whole spread ranging from 1 TB all the way up to an (as of yet unreleased) 8 TB solution as well. That latter drive, will inevitably have to be a dual-sided design, just to accommodate those NAND packages. They're not exactly cheap either, and in the US for the 4 TB variant, without a heatsink, you're talking paying $0.14 per GB of storage; that's far pricier than the likes of Crucial's T700 at 2 TB, with $0.11, or Corsair's MP700 Elite at $0.13 per GB. Although yes, it is fair to say that this drive does outclass both of those SSDs on the sequential front. If you opt for the heatsink version (that we have on test here), you're paying even more at about $0.16 per GB, ouch.

"Performance ready for a new era", says the tagline gracing the top of the 9100's product page. Well, maybe, just a year or so too late. Let me start with the positives: both the 2 TB and the 4 TB variants absolutely rip across sequential performance. They're phenomenally fast. In CrystalDiskMark, figures for the 2 TB land at 14,322 MB/s on average, and 13,318 MB/s on the read. That's the fastest drive I've tested to date. What is less impressive, however, and arguably the far more important metric for any would-be gamer, is the random 4K performance, with the 2 TB unit land at a fairly average 88 MB/s on the read and an astoundingly low, 237 MB/s on the write. That's, not great, for a drive that's meant to be this "fast". In contrast, every other Phison-based SSD I've tested lands a write speed in the 300 MB/s and above range. In fact, every SSD I've ever tested here, sits around that mark, even the 4.0 drives. That is not ideal.

For a very crude analogy, sequential performance is useful if your files are lined up in a row, and you're accessing them one at a time, side-by-side. Random 4K performance (at 1 thread) is more like a game accessing files to load a scene. It's pulling all these random assets, tasks, and processes from all over the place, and similarly writing to the drive as it does it. That's why, for us, random 4K performance is a far more valuable metric. This translates across as well, as even with those rapid sequentials, Crucial's almost two-year-old T700 ran rings around it at near enough a 7-second load time, versus 7.5 for the 9100 Pro.

Then we get on to temperatures, and this is where things get interesting. I was fortunate enough to get two SSDs to test. The 2 TB with heatsink and the 4 TB without heatsink. Theoretically, you can remove the heatsink if you have a small enough Torx set, but I decided to test with it on, and the 4 TB using my motherboard's built-in heatsink as per usual. Throughout the benchmarking process, the 2 TB with heatsink topped out at 82 C, that's about average for a PCIe 5.0 drive. The 4 TB, though, with the motherboard heatsink, landed at a comfortably cool 61 C. Stupendously low. Compare that to the FireCuda 540, and that managed 83 C under that same mobo heatsink.

This tells us two things: firstly, the included heatsink is a bit naff, and secondly, this is one efficient drive when it's cooled correctly. Given the heatsinked variant costs more though, I'd highly recommend opting to ignore that added extra, and instead bury it underneath a solid, dependable, thick, mobo heatsink instead.

So then, has Samsung redeemed itself? Is this the new king of performance? Well, sort of. On paper, that sequential grunt is impressive. It's an awesome marketing number, and if bragging rights are your thing, or you can benefit from those kinds of speeds, then, yes, I suppose it's a solid option. But the problem is that it just lacks that spark.

We've waited so long for an impressive drive to turn up from Samsung, complete with some legendary achievement and some outstanding performance metric, blowing the barn doors off, and yet, what we've got is just, alright. It's just good, and that's a problem, because if you've got a good PCIe 5.0 SSD right now, you're set; you don't need this; why buy it? Samsung needed to come out with this drive, not today, but a year ago. Right now, it just needs more.