It’s taken a couple of years, but Samsung has now finally announced that it’s joining the likes of Corsair and Crucial in the PCIe 5.0 SSD club. The new Samsung PM9E1 promises speeds of up to 14.5GB/s, and the company is also making some big claims about its power efficiency and battery life. Could this finally be a PCIe 5.0 M.2 Samsung SSD that can be practically used in a laptop, and doesn’t need a ridiculously massive heatsink?
Disappointingly, Samsung hasn’t mentioned any details about thermal performance yet, but if the company could nail PCIe 5.0 SSD performance in a power-efficient drive that doesn’t run overly hot, then it could have the best SSD for gaming of the future in its hands. This is the first proper M.2 PCIe 5.0 Samsung SSD to go into mass production, as while the Samsung 990 Evo ostensibly uses the PCIe 5.0 interface, it only uses two lanes, which means it’s no faster than a PCIe 4.0 SSD.
Conversely, Samsung says the new PM9E1 uses four PCIe 5.0 lanes, and the company claims it offers the “industry’s highest performance,” with a sequential read speed of up to 14.5GB/s, along with a sequential write speed of 13GB/s. That meets the read speed of the 2TB Crucial T705, and the write speed even surpasses the Crucial drive. Samsung is entering the PCIe 5.0 arena with all guns blazing.
Rather than using the Phison E26 controller used by most PCIe 5.0 drives right now, the Samsung PM9E1 uses a new in-house controller built on a 5nm process. Meanwhile, the actual storage capacity comes from Samsung’s own 8th-gen 3D V-NAND, which it first announced back in 2022. A wide range of capacities will also be available, spanning all the way from 512GB to 4TB, with 1TB and 2TB drives in between.
While Samsung hasn’t yet provided any indications of operating temperatures, it does claim that the drive offers “significantly improved power efficiency of over 50%,” compared to the PCIe 4.0 Samsung PM9A1a, adding that this “allows for longer battery life.” As you can probably surmise from the humdrum model name, the Samsung PM9E1 is an OEM drive intended for PC manufacturers to put in pre-built systems, rather than a drive aimed at anyone wanting to build a gaming PC themselves.
However, Samsung also claims that the new drive is ideal for “tasks that require intensive workloads such as gaming,” and adds that it “expects to launch PCIe 5.0-based consumer products in the future.” Could we soon be seeing a Samsung 1080 Pro to take on the Corsair MP700 Pro and Crucial T705? Let’s hope so, especially if it runs cooler.
This isn’t the first time Samsung has taken a while to catch up with the rest of the industry when it comes to PCIe interfaces. The PCIe 4.0 Samsung 980 Pro also launched in September 2020, over a year after Corsair launched the MP600, for example.
In the meantime, if you’re thinking about upgrading your storage, check out our full guide on how to install an SSD, where we take you through the whole process of fitting an M.2 drive, including adding a heatsink.