Dynamic Thermal Guard:
While Samsung's NVMe SSDs offer impressive performance, they also generate a good amount of heat. To keep them from overheating, Samsung has implemented what they call Dynamic Thermal Guard (DTG). This technology monitors the temperature of a drive and will reduce its performance once it reaches a certain point.
With the 9100 PRO, Samsung has tried to prevent this drop in performance by dissipating heat more efficiently. The drive has a heat spreader built into the label on the back of the drive as well as a nickel coating on the Presto controller that helps dissipate heat faster. Otherwise, you can go all in and get the heatsink equipped version of the 9100 PRO.
Without a heatsink, the 9100 PRO runs pretty hot. At idle, the drive's temperature hovered around 39 ºC. Under heavy loads, the drive reached temperatures as high as 84 ºC when reading and 83 ºC when writing. At this point, Dynamic Thermal Guard (DTG) was triggered, reducing the drive's transfer speed down to about 11,000 MB/s.
Using my motherboard's M.2 SSD heatsink, I saw a dramatic drop in temps. The 9100 RPO idled at around 34 ºC and reached temperatures as high as 53 ºC when reading and 54 ºC when writing. These temperatures had no impact on the drive's performance. No matter how hard I pushed it, the 9100 PRO did not throttle its read or write speeds in any noticeable way.
Final Thoughts:
Samsung has knocked another one out of the park with its new 9100 PRO SSD. Available with or without a heatsink, this M.2 form factor drive is powered by Samsung's new "Presto" controller and is equipped with up to 8TB of the company's 8th-generation V-NAND flash. Combine this with a large DRAM cache, Samsung's Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 technology and an ultra-fast PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe 2.0 interface and you have one of, if not the fastest consumer NVMe SSDs on the market today. In our sequential read and write tests, the 2TB version of the 9100 PRO was able to read at speeds as high as 14,778 MB/s and write at speeds in excess of 13,550 MB/s. It also did very well in our random write tests, producing more than 339,000 IOPS at low queue depths.
Of course, impressive performance isn't the only thing the 9100 PRO has to offer. Along with support for Samsung's Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 technology, the drive features AES 256-bit full disk encryption and is compliant with both the TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE 1667 specifications. Also, in addition to the optional heatsink, it employs a nickel coating on the controller as well as a heat spreader label for efficient thermal management. To top it all off, the drive works with Samsung's Magician software and is covered by a 5 year warranty.
The Samsung 9100 PRO is available now in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities. Prices for the heatsink-less version currently range from $200 up to $550, with the 2TB version reviewed here retailing for about $300. Otherwise the heatsink-equipped version will run you about $20 more. The 8TB version is expected to ship in the second half of 2025. At this time, there is no word yet on how much it will be.
Highs:
- PCIe 5.0 x4 interface with NVMe 2.0 protocol
- Available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 8TB capacities
- Equipped with Samsung's 8th generation V-NAND technology
- Excellent sequential and random read and write speeds
- Small M.2 2280 form factor
- Features Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 technology
- Large DRAM cache
- AES 256-bit full disk encryption
- TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE 1667 compliant
- Available with or without heatsink
- Works with Samsung's Magician software
- Works with PlayStation 5
- 5 year warranty
Lows:
- Requires high end CPU to reach maximum IOPs
- Can get very hot under heavy workloads
- Requires a heatsink
- Pricey
