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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- An 8TB PCIe SSD that’s offered with or without a heatsink.
- Read and write speeds of up to 14,800 and 13,400 MB/s, respectively.
- Perfect for laptops and desktop with PCIe 5.0, and PlayStation 5.
Looking for an 8TB PCIe 5.0 SSD? Well you’re in luck, because Samsung has announced an 8TB variant of its excellent 9100 Pro M.2 2280 SSD. But such an impressive SSD is going to come with an equally impressive price tag.
The 8TB model is available from Samsung’s store for $999.99, and that’s for the bare drive. If you want the version with the heatsink, that’ll set you back a cool $1,019.99.
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But if you need it, you need it. In my experience, Samsung SSD heatsinks are among the best. Even with the heatsink, the drive is still only 8.8 millimeters (0.35-inch) thick, which is very svelte as SSDs with a heatsink go.
Even with the heatsink, the Samsung 9100 PRO SSD is only 8.8 mm thick.
Samsung/ZDNET
Digging through the spec sheet, it’s clear that the 8TB 9100 Pro packs some serious horsepower. It’s capable of sequential reads of up to 14,800 MB/s, and writes up to 13,400 MB/s, which is the same as the 4TB version of the 9100 Pro, but twice as fast as the 990 PRO SSD line. Random read and writes are equally impressive, at 2,200K and 2,600K IOPS, respectively.
This drive is ready for the toughest workloads, from AI, 4K/8K video rendering, and, of course, gaming (yes, as well as being suited to a laptop or desktop, this will also work in the PlayStation 5).
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Samsung’s new 5-nanometer controller, the chip at the heart of this drive, claims a power efficiency of up to 49% compared to the 990 PRO SSD, which means the drive has less waste heat to deal with. But despite this, if you’re going to be pushing this drive close to its limits, I highly recommend dropping the extra $20 on the heatsink.
Just remember, to get the best possible performance, you will need a system that makes use of PCIe 5.0, so it’s worth checking before dropping this much cash on the drive.
Endurance gets a big bump, up to 4,800 TBW (which stands for Terabytes Written, a measure of how much data can be written to the drive before it’s done for), double the 2,400 TBW of the 4TB version. MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) is rated at 1.5 million hours, which is pretty typical for an M.2 SSD.
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As I said, 8TB SSDs are thin on the ground, but at $1,000, this is one of the priciest on the market, so if you’re looking for something a bit more affordable, then look for SSDs from WD, Lexar, or Sabrent. These are PCIe 4.0 drives, so you’re getting about half the speed, but the price tags are a bit more — but not a lot more — palatable. If you’re system doesn’t support PCIe 5.0, this is the drive to get.
In fact, the only other 8TB PCIe 5.0 SSD I know of that’s been announced is in the WD-BLACK SN8100 lineup, and I don’t know when that’s going to land.