The Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB is a PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSD, the newest generation of internal drive you install in a desktop or laptop, holding everything from the OS to your Steam library. Sequential reads hit 14,700 MB/s, sequential writes hit 13,400 MB/s, both about twice what a PCIe 4.0 drive delivers.Endurance is rated at 1,200 TBW, backed by a 5-year warranty.
An internal hard drive to hold all your important files and documents
PCIe generations are like highway lanes for data between the SSD and the CPU. PCIe 4.0 gave a drive four lanes at a certain speed limit, PCIe 5.0 doubles that speed limit on the same four lanes, and the 9100 PRO is one of the first Samsung drives to actually get close to filling all of them. A 14,700 MB/s read means an entire 4K Blu-ray movie can be read off the drive in about two seconds. Whether you notice depends on what you’re doing with the machine.
A 100GB video project loads into Premiere in about eight seconds at peak speed. A 40GB large language model swaps into memory in three. Photographers batch-processing a shoot of RAW files see the export finish before they’re done clicking. On the flip side, someone using their PC to browse the web and play older games won’t feel the jump from a PCIe 4.0 drive to this one at all, and could put the money elsewhere.
Endurance is 1,200 TBW on the 2TB model. That means you can write 1.2 petabytes of data before the warranty coverage runs out. Someone writing 100 gigabytes a day to the drive would take about 33 years to hit that ceiling, so unless you’re doing something professionally that constantly burns writes, this drive will outlast the computer it’s in.
Heat is the one thing to plan for on any PCIe 5.0 drive. The 9100 PRO ships in two versions: one bare stick that relies on the motherboard’s built-in M.2 heatsink for cooling, and one with an integrated heatsink of its own for $30 more.
Samsung landed on PCIe 5.0 later than a couple of other brands, but arrived with the highest sequential speeds in the current class. The 9100 PRO succeeds the 990 PRO in Samsung’s consumer SSD lineup and sits at the top of the current M.2 range. At $400, down from $680, the current sale cuts $280 off the list price. For a new build on a Ryzen 9000 or Intel Core Ultra board, or an upgrade from a 990 PRO or older Gen4 drive, this fits both the performance target and the price.