The best time to buy an SSD was any time before 2026. The next best time is now, I suppose.
Since the turn of the new year, storage prices have been skyrocketing to levels two, three, or even four times as much as they had been in the previous year. A major cause of these prices going up has been AI. With these tech companies buying up tons of RAM and storage, that’s leaving consumers with inflated rates that make you wish you could turn back time.
Since we can’t do that, the best thing to do is be savvy by tracking prices and jumping on sales before they sellout. Like right now, Amazon has this Samsung SSD 9100 Pro with 1TB of storage on sale for 32% off.
Now it’s worth interrogating that figure. The list price is stated at $340, with the discount taking it down to just $230. That’s a big drop, but we should investigate further.
The 1TB Samsung SSD 9100 Pro first launched early last year with an MSRP of $200. Toward the end of the year, we started seeing bigger and bigger sales, eventually bringing it down to around $130. Then when storage prices exploded in early 2026, it climbed back up way over its MSRP to a high of $340. But now, it’s seeing a dip down to $207 for a limited time.
So while that’s several bucks more that it launched at, that’s still probably the best price you’re going to find an SSD like this for awhile. It’s hard to predict where things will go, but in this current tech climate, paying MSRP plus some change only one year after its release might be as good as its going to get.
Breakthrough Performance
For gamers, a PCIe 5.0 SSD like this one is going to be tough to beat. The Samsung SSD 9100 Pro is capable of reads speeds of up to 14,700MB/s and write speeds of up to 13,300 MB/s. Load times will be virtually no existent. It also can provide high performance for creative workflows like editing 4K video or 3D modeling.
If you’re gaming on console with a PlayStation 5, the Samsung SSD 9100 Pro is compatible but with a catch. You’ll need to use a heatsink with SSD in order to install it in the PS5. Now, there is an option on the product page for that, but that configuration is not reduced in price nearly as dramatically as the standard 1TB SSD. It is currently priced at $133 more. Heatsinks can be purchased separately and range anywhere from $10 to $20. You’re better off buying the standard Samsung SSD 9100 Pro and then adding on a heatsink separately.