The Samsung 9100 Pro is a top performer PCIe 5.0 x4, NVMe 2.0 solid state storage device. NVMe drives are substantially faster than SATA drives but require the use of a PCIe adapter to achieve these speeds.
In any case, the Samsung 9100 Pro is designed to provide improvements even when used with older PCIe versions, like in my case.
The drive uses the Samsung V-NAND TLC and comes with a 1 GB/terabyte cache. This means my 2 TB review drive has a 2 GB cache.
The drives come in 1 TB, 2 TB, 4 TB and a new 8 TB capacity. Depending on how you want to mount it you have the option to add a heatsink. This may not be needed, if considering this drive generates less heat than previous Samsung models.
For the 2TB drive I have here, the maximum average power is 8.1 W, which goes down to 4mW when in sleep mode.
I tested the Samsung 9100 Pro NVMe SSD on a Windows desktop. In my case I have a single PCIe 3.0 card, so replacing the system drive from the old NVMe to the new one required an external NVMe 2.0 enclosure connected via USB.
To transfer the data from my old 1 TB NVMe to the new 2 TB drive I used Samsung Magician to clone the disk.
The Samsung Magician software is available for free, directly from the Samsung website. It allows you to manage all aspects of the Samsung SSD, including overprovisioning and firmware updates.
Total time will vary depending on your system and if you are using just PCIe cards or a mix of PCIe and USB. In my case it took a couple of hours to clone the old drive to the new one.
It did a good job, copying the boot and data partitions. When this was done, I had only to open my desktop and swap the SSD. The system booted with no problems, ready to use.
After checking firmware updates and implementing overprovisioning, I tested the drive.
Even though my desktop has PCIe 3.0 slots, swapping the drives gave me noticeable speed improvements. Sequential reads went from 1590 MB/s to 3500 MB/s and sequential writes went from 940 MB/s to 2740 MB/s.
This shouldn't be a surprise, as the Samsung 9100 Pro NVMe 2TB is rated (with PCIe 5.0) for up to 14,700 MB/s sequential read and 13,400 MB/s sequential write. It can get up to 1,850,000 IOPS for random reads and 2,600,000 IOPS for random write.
Using Samsung Magician to log stats, I have been using the drive for a month now and temperatures never exceeded 40c, during summer in a room without air conditioning.
Both TRIM and S.M.A.R.T operations are supported, and you can also enabled device-based encryption, which requires you to turn the feature on, and then fresh install an OS.
Samsung Magician also gives you performance benchmarks and diagnostics scans. You don’t need different software to manage your SSD.
These drives come with 5-year or a 600TBW/terabyte (terabytes written) warranty, meaning the 2TB drive I’m testing has a 5-year or 1200 TBW warranty.
In terms of experience, yes, things are a lot smoother now. Windows applications feel faster and even my preferred game, Diablo IV, seems to lag less, taking less time between transitions.
If you are building a system from scratch, integration will be a lot faster. But for those like me, moving from one old drive to a new one, the process was easy and automatic. A few points and clicks, go read a book or watch something and in a couple of hours you have a system that’s noticeably faster than before.
