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Samsung introduced an SSD last week that just happens to be a ‘Samsung first’. It is the Samsung 9100 Pro Gen 5 SSD and we have reviewed this previously in its 4TB capacity. Samsung has a reputation of being one of the best in the industry and we might bet that their sales reflect such by a healthy margin. Deservedly, Samsung typically attains our Editor’s Choice Award as being an industry leader. This Samsung SSD is a bit different though. It breaks the mold as Samsung has had to do something they haven’t prior to achieve this 8TB capacity.
Samsung, for the first time ever, is marketing a two-sided retail SSD and this was absolutely necessary in order to make an 8TB SSD available to the consumer. After a bit of discussion with my close friend Jon at Tweaktown in fact, we checked back to find that the last two-sided M.2 SSD Samsung had manufactured was the client XP941 M.2 way back in 2013, and only the 512GB capacity was double-sided. Let’s take a quick look at the side view of our newest Samsung 9100 Pro 8TB SSD:
The Samsung 9100 Pro 8TB Gen5 SSD contains two packages of their 236-layer 8th Gen TLC 3D V-NAND flash memory on each side of the SSD, each being 2TB to achieve the 8TB capacity. This is the only way they could market such. This is a good thing, but definitely limits this SSD with respect to certain laptops. This photo depicts 9100 Pro 8TB SSD placement in our 2025 LG gram Pro 2-in-1 Ultrabook:
In this scenario the V-NAND sits directly on the board and screwing it in cannot be achieved without damage to the SSD and/or board. Is this a big thing? No. This ultrabook was built for single-sided SSDs and there are plenty other laptops that the 9100 Pro might fit perfectly. Samsung was well aware of this scenario and made the right choice to market the 9100 Pro 8TB in any case.
The Samsung 9100 Pro is a PCIe 5.0 (Gen5) x4 (4-lane) M.2 SSD of the 2280 (22mm wide x 80mm long) form factor and it utilizes the latest NVMe 2.0 operating protocol. This SSD is available in 1, 2, 4, and 8TB capacities. Performance is listed at 14800MB/s read and 13400MB/s write along with 2200K IOPS read and 2600K IOPS write for the 8TB capacity and performance specs are variable depending on SSD capacity.
The Samsung 9100 Pro contains the proprietary ‘Presto’ S4LY027 Gen5 NVMe SSD controller. It also includes four pieces of 2TB Samsung Gen 8 236-layer TLC 3D V-NAND flash memory and one piece of Samsung LPDDR4 DRAM cache which mimics the drive capacity in a TB/GB fashion. Fort example, our 8TB SSD contains a whopping 8GB of DRAM cache.
The Samsung 9100 Pro runs at 2400MT/s, contains AES 256-bit full disk encryption, has a five-year warranty and speaks to 600TBW (terabytes written) per TB of drive capacity. Our 8TB sample has a 4,800TBW rating (600×8). Samsung also provides their Samsung Magician for downlaod free of charge, and true power users might consider downloading this utility and setting the 9100 Pro at ‘Full Performance Mode’ as shown here:
Checking Amazon, we can find the 9100 Pro priced at $129.99 (1TB), $199.99 (2TB), and $399.99 for the 4TB version, with an added heatsink for all capacities pushing the price $20 higher. At the time of this report, there was no stock as of yet for the 8TB, but MSRP for this capacity is $999.99. Check Amazon for availability and pricing.
Let’s get to some speeds….