Samsung Accidentally Unveils 9100 PRO, Its First Full-Fledged PCIe 5.0 SSDs

Samsung has unveiled the 9100 PRO series of PCIe 5.0 solid-state drives. Apparently, the announcement was made ahead of time, as the news about it appeared on Samsung’s official Indian website, but the page was later removed. Most likely, the company initially planned to introduce the new generation of SSDs a little later.

Image source: samsung.com

All major SSD manufacturers have been releasing drives with PCIe 5.0 interface support for a long time now – some have already launched several generations of such SSDs, competing with each other in an effort to offer the fastest. And only Samsung, for some reason, was in no hurry, offering only a compromise solution in the form of the Samsung 990 Evo and Evo Plus, which support PCIe 5.0, but not at all as we would like.

The new Samsung 9100 PRO SSDs provide full PCIe 5.0 support and read speeds of up to 14,800 MB/s, which is almost twice as fast as their predecessor, the Samsung 990 PRO. In random read and write operations, the new products reach 2.2 and 2.6 million input/output operations per second (IOPS), respectively. In addition, the new drives are not only faster, but also more energy efficient — their power consumption has been reduced by 49% compared to previous models.

Samsung said it will release the 9100 PRO in 1, 2, 4, and 8 TB capacities. Each version will come with dedicated integrated heatsinks, with the heights ranging from 8.8mm to 11.25mm for the highest-capacity model. The Korean manufacturer also plans to sell heatsink-less versions for users who already have a cooling system on their motherboard.

The Samsung 9100 PRO is priced at INR 14,999 ($173) for 1TB, INR 25,499 ($294) for 2TB, and INR 49,999 ($576) for 4TB. The price of the largest 8TB version has not yet been announced. Prices are likely to vary in other markets, so these figures should be taken as a guide only.