Samsung 9100 Pro PCIe 5.0 8TB NVMe SSD review — Better speeds through consolidation

I recently reviewed the Samsung 9100 Pro and found it to be one of the fastest drives on the market, hands down.  I reviewed a 2TB model and post-review I filled it to the brim with games and videos for editing – it’s a trooper, so I put it to work.  It got me thinking about what having too many drives in my system during regular use might be doing to my overall speeds.  You see, when you fill a motherboard to the brim, you might be causing PCIe lane exhaustion, where some of your drives or even your videocard is left waiting for a data lane to become available to process whatever it’s chewing on.  My test platform doesn’t have this issue as it’s mostly empty on purpose, but my primary gaming rig is a different problem. With the recently-announced availability of the 8TB capacity Samsung 9100 Pro, it was finally time to do some consolidation.

My gaming machine is a sock drawer of various drives I’ve reviewed and very bad habits.  In the primary slot is the 2TB Samsung 9100 Pro, tucked just above the processor to maximize speed.  Below the processor is another PCIe 5.0 x4 slot, which contains a Samsung 990 Pro – a highly capable drive that delivers consistently 7,450 MBps / 6,900 MBps across almost any block size. Below that is a solid drive from TCreate that comes in a few GB/s shy of the 9100 Pro.  Down from here is an older drive from Venom, a 980 Pro, and a final drive that I honestly can’t identify, even running the serial numbers. The “x4” portion of the slot designation above tells you how many slots they use, and the Intel 285K processor has a total of 24 total CPU-attached lanes.  That shakes out as 20 PCIe 5.0 lanes, with four additional coming in at PCIe 4.0.  Obviously you don’t want a high-performing drive falling into that last category.  With five NVMe drives, I was using 20 slots right there, but my videocard is using the first 16 slots on its own.  I also have a capture card using 2 lanes, so we’ve already exceeded the maximum – I have a basic math issue, and I need to solve it.

The first thing I tackled was that mystery drive.  I still don’t know who makes it or what speed it is supposed to be (the hardware comes back as a scramble), but the speed was around the PCIe 3.0 level - 5400 MB/s symmetric.  Despite that, it was topping out at just 39 MB/s, spiking up and down like mad, and struggling to reliably copy at any speed. Copying around 800GB of data off that drive, I just started the copy, turned off the screen, and came back in a few hours.  

I formatted the drive, powered down the machine, and pulled the mystery drive, casting it into the retirement bin. Firing back up, it was time to attend to the 980 Pro.  The Venom is my operating system drive, for now, so the only other drives I could consolidate was this one and the TForce drive, despite both being very competent performers.  A 2TB drive, the 980 holds a few support programs, some backup, and a handful of other bits and bobs. Copying the data off this drive saw the speed pop up to around 42.5 MB/s which is still very far from the correct speed, suggesting it was still being heavily throttled. Again – copy, remove, format, retire.

Fired up once again, I checked my status with a quick data copy and saw it pop up to 2.6 GB/s – now we’re talking!  I checked my assumptions with AIDA64, running a storage stress test to confirm throttling was not still occurring. Running the drive, CPU, and GPU as hard as I could, and to the point where it overheated, I couldn’t get it to throttle any longer.  That’s a win.  Still, the idea is to consolidate down, so it was time to pull another 2TB drive out of my system, though it did find a home in a portable NVMe backup drive

I needed secondary confirmation that this throttling had abated before I re-tested the 9100 Pro 8TB model to ensure my numbers would be accurate.  I ran every stress test I could throw at it, including 3DMark, PCMark, DirectAccess tests, AIDA64, and more. I ran the tests against both the Venom and the Samsung 9100 Pro 8TB model and the 2TB model for good measure.  Let’s start with the numbers. For frame of reference, here are the numbers we saw on the 2TB model when we tested it not too long ago: Starting with CrystalDiskmark:

I also tested with ATTO as it shows longitudinally how a drive performs across a wide variety of block sizes.  

And then finally, the Storage Benchmark in 3DMark.  3DMark simulates loading up a series of titles that are more middle-of-the-pack, like The Outer Worlds, Call of Duty, and others. Endwalker opens a series of various scenes of mixed complexity and provides an overall load time average.  Again, these are the 2TB model tests I did for my previous test – the new tests will be right next to the 8TB tests below. 

Ok – that’s all the historical data we’d need for comparison to see how the two drives compare.  Let’s re-run the battery, starting with CrystalDiskMark: 

The numbers on the 8TB model match that of the 2TB model almost to the megabyte.  Let’s confirm with ATTO so we can see how it performs longitudinally: 

The next test I wanted to run is still synthetic, but more closely resembles game installation, data copies, game loads, level loads, save, move, and recording of footage – a good cross-section of the types of activities you’ll be doing when playing pretty much any game.  Again, let’s see what story the numbers tell: 

As you can see, the 9100 Pro wrecks the Venom, which is no surprise, but what else you can see is that the 2TB and 8TB models are able to hold onto the razor's edge without a problem.  Most often, higher capacity drives have a fall-off the larger they get.  Here we see instead a remarkably consistent speed across all block sizes.  Even deep into the drive there is no fall off in performance. In fact, the 8TB model jumped ahead of the 2TB model by a decent amount.

Another technology afforded to NVMe drives is DirectStorage, allowing a link to the processor directly and to the GPU directly, without as much need to shuttle data back and forth.  There’s a handy visual guide below that should make it easy to understand.  

When DirectStorage is working, it should have a solid force multiplier, and we see that reflected, even on the Venom, which saw a 148% increase in speed for games that support it.  

Both Samsung 9100 Pro drives saw a whopping 199% increase – an absolutely staggering improvement for games like Assassin's Creed Shadows, Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, Star Wars Outlaws, Diablo IV, Monster Hunter Wilds, Doom: The Dark Ages, and even Battlefield 6's open beta all of which make use of the technology.  It’s not widespread usage, but with results like you can see here, it’s obvious why you might want to.  

The question is always “Is this the right drive for me?” and frankly, it depends.  I move large Add to Papaly video files around, and speed matters.  Every time I shove a 40GB file into a video editing tool, the amount of time it takes to ingest it, adjust the video, and render it is very affected by the overall drive speed.  Here we also see some tangible and measurable improvements in load speeds, and the extra storage capacity allows me to keep raw versions of video files for longer to ensure I can iterate on them if necessary.  It also lets me keep games like Call of Duty installed without needing to shuffle them around.  

Ultimately, if you’re speccing your box to be the fastest thing out there, this is a solid contender for that spot.  As a workhorse, it’s blisteringly fast.  As a pure game and storage drive, there are cheaper options.  Just make sure the item you’re putting the drive in can make good use of all this speed.

The last stop on any hardware review is the same – price and warranty.  The drive is available in 1TB ($129.99), 2TB ($199.99), 4TB capacities ($399), and now 8TB ($999), with and without a heatsink (the heatsink will add $19.99 to any price above).  The 1, 2, and 4TB models all picked up solid price improvements, with the 2 and 4 TB models shaving $100 off the top in the last few months. Samsung is aggressively pricing these to move, so I suspect we’ll see deals on all of them for Black Friday / Cyber Monday.  That said, there’s nobody out there able to hit these speeds at this capacity, so the price is warranted.  Yes, you can get 8TB drives for less money, but they’re also half the speed.  All of these drives also come with a 5 year warranty, though I have to admit I’ve never had to use the warranty with Samsung – a testament to solid engineering.