Samsung Electronics America, a world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced the 9100 PRO series solid state drives (SSDs), the newest addition to its consumer SSD lineup. Featuring blazing fast speeds and even more storage capacities, the 9100 PRO and 9100 PRO with Heatsink SSDs are designed to deliver next-gen performance - offering the ultimate storage solution for your digital life.

"From AI-driven creators shaping the future to gamers pushing the limits, we saw a clear need for innovation to support users who need more forward-thinking memory technology as they push the bounds of what's possible in their work," said Jim Kiczek, Vice President of Memory Product Marketing at Samsung Electronics America. "The 9100 PRO SSD establishes a new era of performance to help them achieve exactly that. With more storage, even better speeds, improved power efficiency and seamless reliability, the lineup empowers users to continue innovating without storage limitations."

Although we've been aware of Samsung's 9100 Pro SSD since June last year, it appears that Samsung India got ahead of things and released a press release early about what we can only expect is a soon to launch product. The 9100 Pro is, as you'd expect, a PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD and it will be available in capacities of 1, 2 and 4 TB initially, but it appears that Samsung is also planning to release an 8 TB SKU, which would be a first for its Pro series of SSDs. Samsung will offer all SKUs with or without a heatsink and the 1 to 4 TB versions will come with an 8.8 mm thick heatsink, whereas the 8 TB model will come with an 11.25 mm thick heatsink.

Sadly, Samsung India only shared the sequential performance figures, and we're looking at read speeds of up to 14,800 MB/s and write speeds of up 13,400 MB/s, neither is sticking out from the competition already available in the market. The pulled press release also mentioned random read performance of 2,200K IOPS and random write performance of 2,600K IOPS. As the press release was intended for the Indian market, we only have pricing in Indian rupees and the 1 TB SKU will sell for 14,999 INR or around US$172, including 18 percent VAT, followed by the 2 TB SKU at 25,499 INR or US$293 and finally 49,999 INR or US$573 for the 4 TB SKU. No pricing was revealed for the upcoming 8 TB SKU.

Samsung Electronics just filed trademark paperwork for two unreleased client SSD models, the SSD 990 EVO Plus, and the SSD 9100 PRO. Having exhausted the three-digit model number sequence with the 990 PRO, Samsung is going with the 9000 series for the next nine generations of its flagship M.2-2280 client SSDs, beginning with the 9100 PRO, which will likely be succeeded in the future by the 9200 PRO, 9300 PRO, and so on. Nothing yet is known about the 9100 PRO, but we predict it to be Samsung's answer to the latest crop of Gen 5 drives that offer over 14 GB/s of sequential read speeds, and over 12 GB/s of sequential writes.

The Samsung 990 EVO Plus could be a whole different drive from the current 990 EVO, designed to compete with the value end of Gen 5 SSDs that are based on the new Phison E31T DRAMless Gen 5 controller with around 11 GB/s of sequential transfer speeds on tap. This is something the current 990 EVO cannot achieve, as its controller has a wacky logic that either uses Gen 4 x4 or Gen 5 x2 (it lowers the lane count upon detecting Gen 5). Samsung will probably remove this limitation with the 990 EVO Plus, allowing Gen 5 x4, and getting its performance in the league of the E31T-powered drives.