Introduction

As one of the world leaders in digital technology, Samsung pretty much makes any type of electronic device you can think of. Their products are used by millions of people around the world.

Being a leader in both DRAM and flash memory production, it comes as no surprise that they are also a huge player in the SSD business. Samsung's EVO and PRO Series SSDs are highly popular among upgraders, system builders, and enthusiasts, and also ship in OEM versions with prebuilt desktops and laptops.



The Samsung 9100 Pro is the company's first high-end PCI-Express 5.0 solid-state-drive. Thanks to support for the blazing fast PCIe Gen 5 interface, you can reach transfer speeds of up to 14.8 GB/s. With the 9100 Pro, Samsung is introducing their new "Presto" controller built on a 5 nanometer process, which should help with energy efficiency. The NAND flash is Samsung's newest 3D TLC V-NAND V8 with 236-layers, which is also used on some 990 Evo Plus and 990 Pro models.

The Samsung 9100 Pro is available in capacities of 1 TB ($200), 2 TB ($300), 4 TB ($550) and 8 TB (unknown). A variant with heatsink is available, too, for an additional $20. Endurance for these models is set to 600 TBW, 1200 TBW, 2400 TBW and 4800 TBW, respectively. Samsung offers a five-year warranty with the 9100 Pro SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 5.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller, two flash chips, and a DRAM cache chip.


Samsung has installed this small heat spreader foil on the back of the drive.


It has a thin cooper core which helps a little bit, but isn't powerful enough to compete with a dedicated heatsink.

Chip Component Analysis

The Samsung Presto (S4LY027) controller is built on a 5 nm process at Samsung, with a 5-core Arm Cortex-R8 architecture. It features eight flash channels with support for PCI-Express 5.0 x4 and NVMe 2.0.


The two flash chips are Samsung 236-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


The DRAM cache is a 2 GB LPDDR4X-4266 chip.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 700 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 85% of their capacity. This is intentional, to run the drive in realistic operating conditions—nobody uses a nearly-empty SSD in their system. It also puts additional stress on the pseudo-SLC cache subsystem, because there is less free NAND space to work with.
• Partitions are aligned properly.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen