Today, Samsung has sent over their brand new 9100 PRO 8TB Gen5 NVMe SSD for review. This is the big brother to the 2TB 9100 PRO I looked at back in March. That drive, the 9100 PRO 2TB, almost felt like a statement: Samsung is back at the forefront of SSD performance. This new drive is the super-sized variant. It has 4 times the capacity without sacrificing any performance. That is the claim, so let us get to it!
Here is an Amazon affiliate link to the drive if you want to check current pricing or buy one.
Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD
The Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB comes in a double-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor. The front of the drive contains two NAND packages, the controller, and a DRAM module.
The 9100 PRO is available both with and without a heatsink, and my test drive is the bare drive model. Samsung has a high level of vertical integration with this drive, in that Samsung produces the controller and the NAND in house. The controller is named Presto, and the NAND is 236-layer TLC. Across the 9100 PRO line all drives are equipped with a LPDDR4X DRAM cache at 1GB per 1TB of drive capacity. As a result, this drive has an 8GB DRAM cache to go with its 8TB of NAND.
The backside of the Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB contains two of the four total NAND packages.
Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB SSD Specs
The Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB is now available between 1TB and 8TB capacity points.
The 8TB model is rated for 14800 MB/s sequential read and 13400 MB/s write. This represents a tiny performance increase over the rated read speeds of my previous 2TB test model. Additionally, random read IOPs are rated higher as well, likely due to populating additional channels on the Presto controller, though that is just an educated guess. These numbers peg the 9100 PRO at the top of the Gen5 market.
Endurance is rated at 4800 TBW, which is a huge number that falls right in line for an 8TB drive at 600 TBW per 1TB of capacity. Additionally, as expected the warranty is 5-years.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD and confirms we are operating at PCIe 5.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 2.0.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR5-6000 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. This slot supports up to PCIe Gen 5 x4. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data, and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
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