Samsung announced the start of mass production of PM9E1 NVMe solid-state drives with PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. The manufacturer’s solutions use a proprietary controller, which is produced using a 5nm process technology, as well as 8th generation V-NAND flash memory chips (V8). The company claims high energy efficiency and performance of its new products.
Image source: Samsung
For PM9E1 SSDs, sequential read speeds of up to 14.5 GB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 13 GB/s are claimed. Samsung PM9E1 is available in 512 GB, 1, 2 and 4 TB versions. The manufacturer claims increased energy efficiency of the new drives by more than 50% compared to the previous generation SSD.
All PM9E1 series drives are equipped with Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM) v1.2 security features. These measures should provide additional protection for user data.
Formally, the PM9E1 is not the first M.2 SSD with a PCIe 5.0 interface from Samsung, since the Korean company previously released the Samsung 990 Evo drive. But it was a very strange solution, which had only two PCIe 5.0 lanes, as a result of which it would soon be like an SSD with PCIe 4.0. The new product offers full support for PCIe 5.0 and corresponding speed.
Samsung has not yet announced the cost and release date for PCIe 5.0 SSDs of the PM9E1 series. Note that PM9 series SSDs are produced for the OEM segment, that is, for use in finished computers. But they also appear in retail along with consumer SSDs of the Samsung 900 series. In general, the launch of mass production of PM9E1 may indicate that we will soon see Samsung’s consumer flagship SSD with PCIe 5.0, the conditional Samsung 990 Pro.