Samsung 9100 Pro PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD — Welcome to the next generation of speed

When I built my new system, I loaded it to the hilt.  Intel’s fastest processor, the best board I could buy, a GeForce RTX 5090, and the fastest CU-DIMM I could lay my hands on, but I left one spot open – the top M.2 slot closest to the processor.  This spot, often sitting alone with a tall heat sink on it just above the graphics card and underneath the CPU, is the one that will provide the fastest speeds with the closest and most direct connection to the processor.  I left this spot open for future expansion – a PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD.  It has finally arrived, and frankly, I’m absolutely shocked at not only the synthetic tests, but the real-world results.  Let’s benchmark the Samsung 9100 Pro – one of the fastest drives on the market.

Up to this point, my Samsung 990 Pro ruled the roost, with bustlingly fast speeds that routinely hit Up to 7,450 MBps / 6,900 MBps across almost any block size.  The promise of Direct Drive is finally being realized with Windows 11 getting recent patches (and I’ve got your list of supported games right here), and more games supporting the technology.  Combined with recent motherboards adopting PCIe 5.0 x4, we finally have an alignment of hardware and software to enable tech manufacturers to bring their best work to market. The Samsung 9100 Pro is claiming some pretty staggering numbers, including DOUBLE the speed of PCIe 4.0 – that’s a sequential read speed of 14,800 MB/s and 13,400 MB/s for write.  I do love passing over the generational line of new technology so let’s test!

I’ve always been a fan of CrystalDiskmark and ATTO for benchmarks as they give a wide variety of block sizes to use to show consistency in results.  Let’s start off with CrystalDiskmark:

Normally you see the numbers reversed – read speeds faster than write.  I ran the test a few more times and saw consistent results.  This is precisely why we use more than one utility to test, even in synthetic testing.

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

Surprisingly, we see consistently high read and write speeds, but still inverse of what we’d expect – higher write than read.  Still, the numbers are well within the numbers we’d expect out of a drive this speed.  Synthetic tests are one thing, but obviously it’s the real world speeds that make all the difference.  To do a consistent test on game load speeds, I turn to two tools – 3DMark and the Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker benchmark.  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.  I’ve run both tests with a number of drives, so I have some basis of cross-generational comparison.  

By way of comparison, the drive from Kingston scored 3257, with the 990 Pro bumping up to 4187.  Moving to the Samsung 9100 Pro jumps that to 4662 – a solid improvement over either drive.

Heading over to Endwalker, we see some real world results of those improvements: 

The Kingston Fury was an extraordinarily fast and consistent drive when we reviewed it back in 2022, serving up some fast speeds and delivering solid PCIe 4.0 speeds.  When testing with Endwalker, it delivered a solid 33 second load time average.

Switching to Samsung’s own 990 Pro you can see that the speeds for loading jump fairly significantly, cutting that same load time average down to just 14 seconds!

The Samsung 9100 Pro’s claim is that it’s double the speed of previous generations, it’d have to deliver not only the synthetic numbers, but it’d have to cut that 14 seconds in half, right?  Well…that’s not too hard to test.

At just 7 seconds, it did precisely that.  Synthetic tests are one thing, but seeing ithe game load scene after scene at lighting speed is proof positive that the back of the box claims are not just talk.

There is one thing that the newest gear has done poorly, from video cards to processors, and that’s manage power. GPUs and CPUs have gotten more power hungry than ever, with ever-expanding power supplies to max. Surprisingly, that’s not the case for Samsung’s latest – the 9100 Pro, despite offering double the performance, does so with a whopping 49% reduction in power usage.  While your shiny new laptop might not be able to take full advantage of the jump in speed, it can certainly benefit from less power consumption in both power usage and heat buildup.  

To go with the hardware, Samsung has included their “Magician Software”.  Not only can it provide another point of benchmarking (which we’ll do below), it can also give you a number of health checks, such as S.M.A.R.T. (which can predict drive failures in enough time to migrate your data), migrate your data, encrypt the drive, and more.  It also delivers all of that info in a slick, easy to read, dashboard.  Check it out: 

The numbers we see in Samsung’s benchmarks match our own, and we can also find firmware updates, secure erase, encryption, and several other tools that might come in handy.  It’ll also test non-Samsung devices, so it’s a handy tool to have regardless of manufacturer.  

The question is always “Is this the right drive for me?” and frankly, it depends.  I move large 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.  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 ($199.99), 2TB ($299.99), and 4TB capacities ($549.99), with and without a heatsink (the heatsink will add $19.99 to any price above).  The 8TB models are expected to ship in the second half of 2025. All of these drives also come with a 5 year warranty.