Samsung has announced its new PM9E1 M.2 SSD lineup, offering extreme speeds in capacities up to 4TB. At first look, you may mistake it for a slower M.2 drive, as it doesn’t carry a hefty heatsink. But under its unassuming style hides a beast rated for up to 14.5GB/s read and 13GB/s write speeds. This puts it among the fastest Gen 5 SSDs available on the market.
For comparison, these are nearly identical specs to MSI Spatium M580 Frozr, which requires a massive cooler to run properly. Furthermore, even if new drives come out later powered by the latest Western Digital or Phison controllers, the PCIe Gen 5 x4 interface is already near its maximum theoretical speed, leaving little room for improvements.
Moving to size, Samsung announces four capacities, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. This is enough to satisfy most gamers, but falls short for professionals which this series also targets. Seeing how the price of memory continues to drop, an 8TB version would have been much appreciated, but there’s nothing to say one won’t arrive after launch. As usual, each model will carry some amount of DRAM cache – probably 1GB per TB of capacity – to improve sustained performance.
Samsung is well-known for reliable drives that can last for years. The brand’s ability to manufacture most if not all the parts needed in an SSD likely plays a factor. Thus, it will please many that PM9E1 only uses Samsung parts. These specifically are an in-house 5nm controller and eighth-gen V-NAND flash. The brand also claims 50% higher efficiency, making it adequate for battery-powered devices.
“Our PM9E1 integrated with a 5nm controller delivers industry-leading power efficiency and utmost performance validated by our key partners,” says YongCheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. “In the rapidly growing on-device AI era, Samsung’s PM9E1 will offer a robust foundation for global customers to effectively plan their AI portfolios.”
Samsung didn’t share any price or release dates for the PM9E1 series. However, looking at the competition, it should cost around £180 for 1TB, £330 for 2TB, and £590 for 4TB.