Samsung 9100 Professional SSD Evaluation: A PCIe Gen 5 Storage Efficiency Champ

	Samsung 9100 Professional 4TB SSD: $429.99 The Samsung 9100 Professional marks the corporate’s entrance into the high-performance PCIe Gen 5 devour SSD market and it is a pressure to be reckoned with.
	Glorious All-Round Efficiency Configurable Through Samsung Magician Excessive Capacities Single-Sided Design Comparatively Cool Working	Should Allow Excessive-Energy Mode For Finest Perf Small Worth Premium

Samsung 9100 Professional SSD Specs And Options

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The Samsung 9100 Professional SSD collection function Samsung’s newest V-NAND LC flash reminiscence. To be particular, the drives are outfitted with 2,400MT/s, 1024Gbit V8 V-NAND. Samsung’s newest V-NAND gives decrease latency for reads and writes, at comparable or decrease energy than its predecessors. The 4TB drive you see pictured right here has two 2TB flash packages, which reside on the identical facet of the PCB because the controller and LPDD4X DRAM cache (1GB per 1TB of capability).

9100 Professional collection drives are outfitted with Samsung’s personal “Presto” controller, which is manufactured on Samsung’s 5nm course of node. It options an 8-channel design, with a local PCIe Gen5 interface, and a 5-core ARM 32-bit Cortex-R8 CPU advanced. The drives themselves use the widespread 2280 kind issue, and shall be bought as each naked drives (like you see right here) or with a heatsink. As a result of single-sided, design and comparatively low-power controller and NAND, the 9100 Professional is appropriate for recreation consoles and laptops.

The Presto controller helps the entire options you’d count on from a contemporary SSD, like TRIM, rubbish assortment, S.M.A.R.T., and so on., along with varied encryption applied sciences. Relying on the capability, the drives additionally function 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of discrete LPDDR4X DRAM cache, with the upcoming 8TB drive packing the utmost config. As of this writing, the 4TB mannequin featured right here is the biggest capability accessible at retail.

Like many previous-gen Samsung SSDs, the controller has a nickel coating that helps to dissipate warmth, and the underside of the drives has a skinny plate hidden beneath a decal to assist in cooling. The drives additionally help Samsung’s Dynamic Thermal Guard function, which helps handle energy and thermals based mostly on the drives’ workload on the time, to reduce any potential thermal throttling.

Samsung 9100 Professional drives additionally function TurboWrite 2.0 know-how, just like some previous-gen drives. TurboWrite 2.0 makes use of a portion of the drive’s V-NAND as an SLC write buffer, which leads to improved write efficiency, so long as the buffer isn’t exhausted. As was the case with previous-gen drives, the TurboWrite 2.0 buffer dynamically adjusts in measurement based mostly on the workload.

TurboWrite 2.0 can even permit the Samsung 9100 Professional drives to carry out effectively within the overwhelming majority of consumer-class workloads, as a result of writes are quickest when the SLC buffer is being utilized. As soon as the buffer is exhausted, write efficiency can taper off, however on the 4TB drive, the SLC cache is flushed quick sufficient to take care of sturdy write efficiency throughout your entire capability of the drive. Until you’re always writing huge information from a supply sooner than the 9100 Professional, you’re not prone to stumble upon the TurboWrite 2.0 buffer measurement.

Samsung warranties the 9100 Professional collection drives for five years, which is in step with previous-gen choices, and the drives are additionally supported by Samsung’s Magician SSD administration utility. That is vital to notice as a result of to allow peak efficiency on a desktop PC, operating Magician is important to allow a higher-powered / high-performance mode. For house constrained laptops and recreation consoles, operating the drive out-of-box is advisable, however when you’ve obtained a desktop PC, with a motherboard that’s obtained built-in NVMe heat-plates, there’s no purpose to not run in high-power mode.

Samsung 9100 Professional Benchmark Efficiency

Beneath every take a look at situation, the SSDs featured right here have been put in as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed’s motherboard was up to date with the most recent BIOS accessible on the time of publication and Home windows 11 was totally up to date as effectively. Home windows Firewall, automated updates, and display screen savers have been all disabled earlier than testing, and Focus Help was enabled to forestall any interruptions. 

In all take a look at runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch knowledge was purged, and waited a number of minutes for drive exercise to settle and for the system to succeed in an idle state earlier than invoking a take a look at. All the drives right here have additionally been up to date to their newest firmware as of press time. The place relevant, we’d additionally usually use any proprietary NVMe drivers accessible from a given producer. When not accessible, the drives used the in-box Microsoft NVMe driver included with Home windows 11 (the entire drives examined on this article used the in-box Home windows driver).

HotHardware’s Check System:

IOMeter Benchmarks

IOMeter is a well-respected trade customary benchmark. Nonetheless, regardless of our outcomes with IOMeter scaling as anticipated, it’s debatable as as to if or not sure entry patterns really present a legitimate instance of real-world efficiency. The entry patterns we examined might not mirror your specific workloads, for instance, or mirror the conduct of precise purposes. That stated, we do suppose IOMeter is a dependable gauge for relative throughput, latency, and bandwidth with a given storage answer. As well as, there are particular highly-strenuous workloads you’ll be able to place on a drive with IOMeter that you may’t with most different storage benchmark instruments.

Within the following tables, we’re exhibiting two units of entry patterns; a customized Workstation entry sample, with an 8K switch measurement, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) entry and a 4K entry sample with a 4K switch measurement, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random entry. Queue depths from 1 to 16 have been examined…

The Samsung 9100 Professional provided persistently sturdy efficiency throughout each entry patterns, no matter queue depth. In actual fact, because the queue depth elevated, the Samsung 9100 Professional pulled forward of the entire different drives.

When it comes to its common switch speeds with each entry patterns, the Samsung 9100 Professional’s main efficiency on this benchmark is extra obvious. The drive provided the best throughput of the bunch.

Latency was additionally a powerful level for the Samsung 9100 Professional. Throughout each entry patterns and all queue depths, the Samsung 9100 Professional provided extremely aggressive or class-leading latency efficiency.

SiSoft SANDRA 2023

Subsequent, we used SiSoft SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant for some fast assessments. Right here, we used the File System Check and supply the outcomes from our comparability SSDs. Learn and write efficiency metrics, together with the general drive rating, are detailed beneath.

SANDRA’s File System Benchmark had the Samsung 9100 Professional profitable silver, simply behind the Phison-based M580 Frozr. Be aware, the M580 has a large heatsink hooked up which in all probability helps preserve any potential thermal points in examine and permits the drive to run flat-out always.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO is one other “fast and soiled” sort of disk benchmark that measures switch speeds throughout a particular quantity size. It measures uncooked switch charges for each reads and writes and graphs them out in an simply interpreted chart. We selected .5KB via 64MB switch sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a complete max quantity size of 256MB. ATTO’s workloads are sequential in nature and measure uncooked bandwidth, reasonably than I/O response time, entry latency, and so on.

The fastes drives listed below are all tightly grouped, and the Samsung 9100 Professional stays within the combine all through within the learn take a look at. Within the write take a look at, nevertheless, the Samsung drive really leads with 4 -16K switch sizes, however drops to the center of the pack with bigger 128K – 4MB switch sizes.

Learn and write IO throughput, nevertheless, was one other sturdy suite for the Samsung 9100 Professional. WIth the smaller switch sizes — that are most vital for shopper workloads – the 9100 Professional leads the pack.

Blackmagic Disk Pace Check Benchmark

Subsequent up we the DIsk Pace Check from Blackmagic Design. The Blackmagic Disk Pace Check is a straightforward instrument to shortly measure and certify disk efficiency for working with top quality video information. The benchmark will be configured with varied file sizes, from 1GB to 5GB. We examined with the biggest 5GB file measurement and allowed the benchmark to loop for 3 minutes earlier than recording the outcomes.

The Samsung 9100 Professional additionally led the pack within the Blackmagic Disk Pace take a look at, at the least within the learn take a look at. Within the learn take a look at, the Samsung 9100 Professional technically lands about in the midst of teh pack, however only some MB/s separates it from the quickest drives.