Customer Ratings & Reviews

Pros Spectacular bandwidth: Nearly doubling Gen 4 speeds—ideal for large file transfers, content creation, heavy-duty gaming, and AI workloads. Solid thermals: Operates cooler and more efficiently than other Gen 5 SSDs, even without a heatsink amazon.com +2 techradar.com +2 amazon.com +2 . Trusted brand ecosystem: Backed by Samsung Magician software—firmware updates, drives health diagnostics, encryption support amazon.com +2 tomshardware.com +2 semiconductor.samsung.com +2 . Strong endurance & warranty: 1200 TBW for 2 TB model with a 5‑year limited warranty tomshardware.com +15 servethehome.com +15 techpowerup.com +15 . ⚠️ Cons Pricey: Premium cost—Samsung 9100 Pro 4 TB at $449 ($0.12/GB) compared to ~ $0.06–$0.07/GB for Gen 4 drives samsung.com +15 tomshardware.com +15 amazon.com +15 . Marginal gaming benefit: Real-world gains in load times are modest versus high-end Gen 4 SSDs . Late entry: Released after competitors already saturated Gen 5, so lacks a distinct edge in one category . Heatsink needed for some setups: Bare version may require added cooling in compact builds or laptops.

I've been a fan and long time user of Samsung drives ever since their 800 line of 2.5" drives. Once they moved to the new M.2 format and NVMe specifically, I have used their 980 Pro, 990 Pro and now their 9100 Pro. I have Samsung SSDs in all my laptops and personal desktops. Packed in a nice, small sized box, one thing Samsung does is stay consistent with their packaging externally which I like. I already was using a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB as my main drive on an Asus X870e Crosshair Hero AM5 board which is PCIE5 enabled, so I went ahead and ran Crystal Disk Mark (CDM) on it to collect it's already blazing speeds before upgrading to the new 9100 2TB model with a clean install for comparison. I installed Samsung Magician just to over provision and check to see if a new firmware was available but as of the date of this review, the firmware included is the newest. For sequential speeds it is blazingly fast. I mean twice as fast as the 990 Pro even for Q8T1 and with Q1T1 reads are almost 3x as fast and writes again almost 2x as fast. This means for video editing, large model processing, large file transfers, transactions and any type of linear data processing, the gains are very impressive. Unfortunately, as has been the problem with SSD drives since 2.5" models, random reads and writes have stagnated and by the design of most SSDs themselves outside of Intel Optane and similar approaches, you will see relatively the same speeds. Most desktop and day to day functions are random in nature so you will not experience a meaningful uptick in your normal desktop performance. The good thing is that even older SSDs are still miles ahead of mechanical drives and very fast and this holds true for the 9100 Pro 2TB from Samsung. M.2 drives can run warm. NVMe variants run hot and as speeds increase so has heat. A heatsink of some sort is pretty much mandatory for Gen4x5 NVMe drives to stop them from heating up and throttling down but luckily most modern motherboards come with built in heatsinks. Even a basic NVMe heatsink will work to help keep temps at bay. My motherboard has a monster sized heatsink so running the Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB is no problem for my workflow. So if you need absolutely mind blowing PCIE5 level sequential speed and have the hardware to support it, the Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB is an absolute speed monster. I will continue to stick with Samsung as they continue to deliver time and time again.

I recently picked up a Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD drive – it is is Samsung's foray into the high-performance PCIe 5.0 SSD market, aiming to deliver exceptional speeds and reliability for demanding users. It’s a high-end storage platform that will truly enhance your computing and gaming experience – so long as you have a compatible machine to accept PCI 5.0 NVMe drives. My newest machine at home only support PCIe 4.0 – so I don’t see the maximum performance benefits the device provides – but it still improved my overall speed and experience! So – plan ahead on this…. The 9100 Pro boasts impressive sequential read and write speeds, making it one of the fastest consumer SSDs available. In synthetic benchmarks, it outperforms many competitors, particularly in sequential operations . However, in real-world applications, especially those involving random read/write tasks, the performance gains over high-end PCIe 4.0 drives were less obvious. Despite its high performance (usually comes hand in hand with more heat generation), the 9100 Pro maintains good thermal efficiency. Tests indicate that even under sustained workloads, the drive operates within acceptable temperature ranges, especially when equipped with a heatsink (which you can buy separately). This makes it suitable for systems with adequate cooling solutions. You can see this by installing and using the Samsung Magician SW, which can provide you with all sorts of interesting characteristics! While the 9100 Pro offers top-tier performance, its premium pricing may not be justifiable for all users, especially when Samsung also offers high-quality PCIe 4.0 alternatives are available at lower costs. Overall, the Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB SSD is a powerhouse designed for professionals and enthusiasts who demand the highest storage performance. Its impressive specifications make it ideal for tasks involving large file transfers, such as video editing or 3D rendering. However, for general consumers or gamers, the tangible benefits over more affordable PCIe 4.0 SSDs may be minimal.

One of the most prominent players in the consumer solid state disk (SSD) space has been Samsung. Since 2006, Samsung has regularly offered among the highest-performing SSDs on the market, delivering performance and reliability that other manufacturers have struggled to match. As the computing industry moves to the latest PCIe 5.0 interface, so too have SSD manufacturers begun offering new drives to take advantage of the increased speeds. Samsung’s 9100 Pro SSD is the company’s first offering optimized for the new interface, promising top-tier performance for the latest desktops, laptops, and game systems designed to harness every fragment of speed on offer. Though a little behind its competition using similar hardware and priced at a premium, Samsung’s reputation for performance and quality shines through on this new offering. Note that this drive is sold barebone - there are no adapters or cables included to transfer your data from existing disks to the 9100 Pro, and thus this product is not intended for novice users. If you are not familiar with moving or reinstalling your operating system (e.g. Windows, MacOS), speak with a Geek Squad associate for recommended services prior to purchasing. - Unboxing & Installation With little more than the disk itself and an installation guide with warranty information booklet in the box, the 9100 Pro has more packaging than product. The NVMe M.2 disk is the standard 2280 (22mm x 80mm) size, about as large as a stick of gum, and has a sticker covering the NAND with all the usual branding. This SSD is single-sided (no chips on the backside) so it should fit in nearly every device supporting 2280 size disks without issue, including game consoles and handhelds. Installing the 9100 Pro is as simple as installing any other M.2 SSD. Once recognized by the system, the disk will need to be initialized then formatted by the operating system prior to use (this typically occurs during an OS installation). Samsung uses the 1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes metric to market the drive; thus, formatted capacity is 1863 GB. There is in fact a full two terabytes of NAND memory onboard but the remainder is used as over-provisioning space, which helps to extend the life of the drive by spreading data writes to the least-used memory cells before rewriting existing ones. A five-year, 1200 terabytes written warranty should cover most use cases as only power users will see that much data written within five years, much less ten. - Performance There’s no other way to put it - the 9100 Pro is blisteringly fast. Installed in my custom desktop with a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, benchmarking the disk shows performance within margin of error of the box’s 14,700 MB/s claims for sequential reads. As to be expected, random small reads and writes drop below 1GB/s, but the IOPs (input-output operations per second) ratings are still off the charts, pushing nearly 200,000 read and 170,000 write in my testing. In more laymans’ terms, this disk performs like DDR3 RAM when reading or writing sequentially, and performs like first-generation DDR RAM when reading or writing randomly. Considering I was around when DDR was first introduced, seeing a storage device perform like system RAM feels borderline whimsical. Part of what helps the 9100 Pro achieve these speeds is the welcome inclusion of a DRAM cache. The SSD has 2GB of high-speed LPDDR4X memory that the storage controller uses to queue up data before it’s written to the NAND flash, allowing the 9100 Pro to effectively tell the host computer or game console that it is ready to receive more operations while the memory controller works in the background to write the data to the NAND. The result is that for all but large, continuous writes (such as transferring multiple 4K movies in a single go), performance remains stellar. This is a fantastic disk for high-disk-demand work like video editing and large database management - lower-tier SSDs will forego the DRAM cache and lean entirely on the NAND, resulting in a significant drop in performance (and higher wear on the disk) that power users will notice. My only concern with the 9100 Pro’s performance is that it can get fairly warm when you ask a lot of it, and it does not come with a heatsink. I saw temperatures peak at nearly 70C even when utilizing the heatsink and thermal pads my motherboard provided, while the NVMe 4.0 disk I had installed previously (a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB) rarely hit 60C. These temperatures aren’t as concerning as they would be for traditional hard disks, but in any case I would recommend utilizing a heat spreader of some kind if you are able. This is a high-performance disk pushing the envelope of what modern devices can support, after all. - Samsung Magician One of the included perks of Samsung SSDs is access to the Samsung Magician software, a complete diagnostic and device management package available for Windows, MacOS, and Android that offers many handy functions including firmware update and drive health statistics. If you have a spare M.2 slot or a USB M.2 adapter, the best feature of the software is arguably the Data Migration functionality. With just a few clicks, Samsung Magician will automatically clone your existing hard drive or SSD to the 9100 Pro (or any other Samsung SSD), given the new disk is large enough to support the transfer. Crucially, the software clones the entire disk including the Master Boot Record (MBR) or Guided Partition Table (GPT), which means after data migration you can simply swap your old disk for the newly-migrated disk and be up and running again. After years of doing this process manually or with the help of paid third-party applications every time I changed SSDs and didn’t want to reinstall my operating system, Samsung Magician worked quickly and flawlessly - the entire operation took about 20 minutes to copy a half-terabyte installation to the new disk (your speeds will vary depending on what hardware you use - USB will almost always be slower than an NVMe slot), and after swapping my old SSD to the 9100 Pro the system booted using the new hardware without any further configuration. Great stuff! - Bottom Line Samsung SSDs almost always hit their performance expectations, and the 9100 Pro is no exception. Their first PCIe 5.0 outing delivers right in line with their advertised speeds, and assuming you have a device that can harness the full potential of the latest PCIe version, you’ll be treated to an experience that’s really only limited by the rest of your hardware. To move beyond the 9100 Pro’s performance you’re spending quite a bit more money on purpose-built, datacenter optimized hardware. The Samsung Magician software is the icing on the cake that consumers and prosumers alike can utilize for a pain-free migration experience. All told, the 9100 Pro comes highly recommended!

This SSD has been an excellent upgrade for my system. The installation was very simple, it was immediately recognized, and the performance is fantastic. Boot times are almost instant and games load noticeably faster. The drive stays cool even under heavy use and offers very stable speeds for large file transfers. Overall, it feels like a great balance of speed, value, and reliability. Highly recommended if you are looking for a solid NVMe drive

Super fast, you probably will not notice a difference in gaming loading times. Right now, for gaming you should stick with a 990 pro or 980 pro. Saying that, its the fastest ssd you can get and does not run hot at all while gaming.

Took my old laptop to the next level. runs fast and cool, power efficiency is great. Kudos Samsung

Anyone who wants great speeds for file transfer, read, and write, this is the way to go. Gen 5 is the future and the difference from my Gen 4 M.2 is noticeable. Utilizing GPT format allows for improved partitioning. I have many partitions on this one drive for Windows, Game installations and other Software. Documents now live on my Gen 4 drive and all loadable content lives on this M.2. Hardly any load times on any of my games.

Install was easy and straight forward. Fast speeds. Would buy again.

Second current fastest speeds of this gen. Best for gaming. Not too overkill. Great for enthusiast gaming

Working great so far and FAST. 9900x, 870 motherboard

Great ssd, super fast and cool, good price per performance

Never had an m.2 before but for a newbie it was easy to install, for the price I had high expectations of this m.2 and it works better than expected, boots up fast and can manage to open my apps/games faster than usual. Very satisfied with this purchase!

The Samsung 9100 Pro 2 TB is unbelievable fast, even in nonsequential read and write (70/30%). It’s worth noting that you will not get the list speeds unless you’re transferring to or from other storage devices, which can also accommodate those transfer rates, and this also holds true for data transfer cables. The ideal use case is if you have multiple 5x4 ports on your mobo to take full advantage of this device’s speed, but you should have 1 gen 5 anyway for the 9100 pro itself. . . . So long as your MOBO has a heat-sync, thermal padding, and your case has proper airflow, don’t stress the thermal throttle issues that some mention. I ‘will’ buy again.

These new SSD's From Samsung is the real deal... Even on an older Gen 3 PCIe board, I'm getting the fastest speeds ever and no buffering caching sluggishness that I was having before on my Windows 11 laptop... The 8TB just came out, will be waiting for the price to come down more before jumping to 8TB... I am going to buy more of these for my portable SSD USB devices... Glad I waited for these and didn't but the last generation of them...

Samsung 9100 Gen 5 SSD. Fastest m.2 storage money can buy! Was very easy to install on my Mag x670e tomahawk Motherboard. Now I have extra space for battle field 6.

Overall excellent for productivity with video editing and if you do any large transfers. Something like this however, isnt much different compared to a Gen4 drive in pretty much every other aspect. If you are playing games or something that doesnt demand such high read/write speeds then this isnt the drive for you.

I used this to replace a Gen 4 drive that I had in a laptop. Once it was set up I noticed an immediate increase in speed. It also had additional storage, which was a bonus! I am very impressed so far.

Amazing read and write speeds. This SSD is the fastest in the world as of this writing I believe. I never knew what I was missing before adding blazing fast I/O speeds to my PC. 10/10 - highly recommended.

Definitely worth it for video editing.. noticeable difference from Gen 4.