The Samsung 9100 Pro PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 2280 NVMe solid-state drive promises blisteringly fast data transfer speeds of up to 14,700 MB/s.

“You can never have too much storage”. That was a phrase that I used to parrot out in many of my old hard drive reviews. With physical disk sizes climbing up into the terabytes, folks had absolutely no reason ever to clear out their old junk files. Why spend hours sifting through duplicates of your rubbish holiday photos when you could just buy another hard drive?

As always is the case with tech, it’s about the numbers. The bigger the number, the better (latency, excepted). Back in the day, when enjoying the pleasure of filling up your new 8TB SATA6 hard disk drive with the entire contents of your Steam library, the fact that it was only transferring data at 130 MB/s was of no concern.

But times have changed.

Massive volumes of data storage space are just not required like they once were. Internet data transfer speeds surpass those of our old PC internals. We now need to access our local data as quickly as possible; otherwise, we might as well stream it from the cloud. If you are editing photos, video, or even playing the latest games, the fast data access speed of an NVMe (non-volatile memory express) SSD is important, and that’s where modern drives like the Samsung 9100 Pro come in.

The Samsung 9100 Pro PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD is one of the fastest available consumer storage drives on the market. The PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) 5.0 specification allows for a theoretical data throughput at around 4GB/s per lane (i.e.x1) up to a staggering 16GB/s (x4 lanes). Factors such as controller design, thermal limits and other system components can affect these speeds.

So, whilst a PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD with four lanes could theoretically hit 16GB/s (or 16,000MB/s), around 14GB/s is the usual. The 9100 Pro, having four lanes, is rated at 14,700 MB/s, which, again, is very much dependent on the hardware it is plugged into.

The touted maximum data transfer speed of the Samsung 9100 Pro PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD comes with a caveat: it needs a suitably compatible device to enjoy anywhere near said speeds.

Unless your PC motherboard or device is PCIe 5.0 x4-ready, you are not going to get the 9100 Pro SSD anywhere near 14,700MB/s transfer rates. It will work with a PCIe 4.0 or even a PCIe 3.0 device, but you’ll not be getting the data transfer speeds that you’ve paid for.

The Samsung 9100 Pro PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD was tested with a PCIe 5.0 x4-ready Asus TUF Gaming Z890-Pro WIFI motherboard and an Intel Core Ultra 9. Like most PCIe 5.0 x4 motherboards, it has an M.2 socket heatsink built into the design.

One of the main drawbacks with PCIe 5.0 x4 (and PCIe 4.0 x4, for that matter) is the heat.  The supplied 9100 Pro SSD has a factory-fitted heatsink. This meant discarding the heatsink that fits over the PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 bay included with the motherboard.

You will find that most PCIe 4.0 x4 and PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe compatible motherboards will likely have a chunky heatsink covering the relevant M.2 socket. This is because these fast SSDs are also available without a factory heatsink.

The 9100 Pro is also available without a heatsink. The advantage of buying an SSD with no heatsink is that you can use the motherboard heatsink, instead, if it has one, and the build looks a bit better. The disadvantage of an NVMe without a factory-fitted heatsink is that if your device lacks an integrated M.2 heatsink, you will need to purchase one. Running a PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe without a heatsink is not recommended and can damage your equipment.

Installing the new 9100 Pro was a breeze, aided by the Asus motherboard’s screwless design, allowing me to quickly clip the NVMe drive into place. Upon restarting Windows, opening the Disk Management app allowed the machine to instantly recognise the new drive, prompting it to initialise the SSD and format it.

Using the CrystalDiskMark storage drive speed benchmarking app, the Samsung 9100 Pro achieved remarkably fast data transfer speeds: a maximum read speed of 12,168.73 MB/s and a maximum write speed of 13,012.27 MB/s. Whilst this is not the stated maximum on the box, it’s a substantial improvement over that of a PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD.

For comparison, the WD_Black SN850X PCIe 4.0 x4 drive that I recently tested achieved an impressive max read speed of 6938.45 MB/s and write of 6689.33 MB/s. And, as I mentioned, my trusty 8GB HDD with its 130 MB/s is ninety-three times slower than the Samsung 9100 Pro. That’s just a decade of technological advancement.

PCMark10 system drive benchmark yielded a bandwidth score of 686.34 MB/s with an average access time of 37 microseconds. The 3D Mark Storage Benchmark score of 2051 suggested average game data transfer speeds of 357.30 MB/s and access times of 89 microseconds.

Overall, the results were good. The Performance Test 11.0 Disk Mark result of 97845 (with top sequential read speeds of 12225 MB/s and write speeds of 13124) placed the SSD in the 99%-tile speed range. As a check, I swapped out the Asus motherboard for a high-end MSI MEG Z890 Unity-X to see if I could get a little more speed from the SSD.

The increase was negligible, still getting max read speeds of around 12,000 MB/s and write speeds of 13,000 MB/s. Of course, there are all synthetic tests, with multiple factors in play that can affect the scores. The higher write speed, which was consistent for both the Asus and MSI motherboards, was unusual, with read speeds typically being faster.

It’s not just productivity applications and creative endeavours, such as video editing, that can take advantage of faster data transfer speeds. With some games requiring an SSD and Microsoft’s Direct Storage API finally taking off, gamers probably need to consider fast data access more than most. To play Assassin’s Creed Shadows on a PC, installation on an SSD is recommended. If you do install it on a physical hard disk drive, it’ll take forever to load and then likely crash after just a few minutes.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows took just 47 seconds to load from the Samsung PCIe 5.0 drive. This is compared to 57 seconds from a PCIe 4.0 drive and over five minutes from a regular hard drive.

It could be argued that PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD speeds are slightly ahead of the curve and that even the speeds of PCIe 4.0 storage drives are faster than most users will ever require. But the same could be said for most high-end PC components, and it’s really down to personal preference.

If you have a device that is ready for PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Samsung 9100 Pro will help you to achieve some astounding data transfer speeds, complementing your other high-end components.  It’s a lightning-fast, modern data storage device that’ll likely improve both your productivity and gaming applications.