With its first PCIe 5.0 SSD, Samsung finally tries to catch up with rivals such as Crucial but is it already too late?

• After two years, Samsung’s first PCIe 5.0 consumer SSD has (almost) arrived
• The 9100 Pro doubles speeds over the 990 Pro, hitting 14,800MB/s
• Launching in April 2025 with up to 4TB models, plus an 8TB version later this year

After nearly two years of waiting, Samsung’s first consumer PCIe 5.0 SSD – that people can actually buy – has arrived. The 9100 Pro is the company’s attempt to finally compete with PCIe 5.0 drives from brands like Crucial, Gigabyte, and Corsair, which have been on the market for a while.

The 9100 Pro, which was teased in 2024 as the PM9E1, is a step up from Samsung’s previous 990 Pro SSD, nearly doubling speeds thanks to the PCIe 5.0 interface. The drive offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 14,800MB/s and 13,400MB/s, respectively, while also improving random read and write speeds to 2,200K IOPS and 2,600K IOPS. That’s a performance boost of up to 99% compared to its predecessor.