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Samsung is officially announcing mass production has begun for a new M.2 SSD that has the highest capacity and performance ever offered by the company. The drive has the flashy name of PM9E1 (pardon the pun); it’s likely an OEM drive or one aimed at enterprise, as it doesn’t have the company’s typical 980/990 naming scheme. However, it seems like a harbinger of what is to come when Samsung does release a drive for consumers with a PCIe 5.0 interface.
Samsung apparently announced the new SSD via a press release but has now pulled it from its website for unknown reasons. TechPowerUp published the release in full, noting it’s the company’s flagship offering for M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSDs. It comes in capacities including 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB and offers sequential read/write speeds of 14.5GB/s and 13GB/s, respectively. This would place it in the upper echelon of PCIe 5.0 drives, but a 4TB drive with these speeds is still somewhat of a rarity.
Samsung’s 8th gen V-NAND debuted in 2022 and features 2.4Gb/s of I/O bandwidth.
Credit: Samsung
Samsung says the PM9E1 is designed to boost on-device AI performance, which laptop makers are beginning to implement with the new incoming Copilot+ PCs. It uses the company’s 8th gen V-NAND flash, which is curious as it’s already announced 9th-generation QLC and TLC V-NAND, so it’s strange it’s not used for this drive. The 8th-generation flash sports 236 layers, while the 9th generation allegedly increases that to 290 (Samsung has yet to confirm).
The new PM9E1 is a hefty upgrade to the company’s previous offering in this category, the PM9A1. The previous drive was a TLC SSD using 6th generation V-NAND and a PCIe 4.0 interface, so performance has doubled. The controller has also undergone a node shrink from 8nm on the previous drive to 5nm on the new version.
It remains to be seen where this drive will end up, but it will likely begin appearing in laptops rather than internal drives made for DIY PC builders. The PC gaming community is still waiting for Samsung to announce a PCIe 5.0 consumer SSD to succeed the 990 Pro, which is a PCIe 4.0 drive. We’d wager that when it arrives, it’ll have similar specs as the PM9E1 and will probably also use 9th-generation V-NAND.