Samsung PM9E1 Gen5 SSD begins mass production: its fastest SSD so far, at 14.5GB/sec reads

Samsung has announced it has started mass production of its new PM9E1: a new Gen5 SSD with the industry's highest performance and largest capacity.

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The company is using a Gen5 SSD controller that's made on its in-house 5nm process node, using 8th-generation V-NAND (V8) technology. Samsung says its new PM9E1 will provide "powerful performance and enhanced power efficiency, making it an optimal solution for on-device AI PCs".

Samsung has made improvements to performance, storage capacity, power efficiency, and security over its predecessor in the PM9A1a SSD. YongCheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics, said: "Our PM9E1 integrated with a 5 nm controller delivers industry-leading power efficiency and utmost performance validated by our key partners. 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's new PM9E1 Gen5 SSD features an 8-channel PCIe 5.0 interface, with sequential reads of up to 14.5GB/sec (14,500MB/sec) and sequential writes of up to 13GB/sec (13,000MB/sec) which have over doubled compared to the pre vious generation. This additional performance enables even faster data transfer speeds, boosting data-intensive AI applications and allowing for 14GB large language models (LLMs) to be transferred from the SSD to the DRAM in less than a second.

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Samsung will be making its new PM9E1 SSD in 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, and the industry's largest capacity of 4TB. The monster 4TB Gen5 SSD is an "optimum solution for PC users in need of high-capacity storage for large-sized files such as AI-generated contents, data-heavy programs, and high-resolution videos, as well as tasks that require internsive workloads such as gaming".

The company highlights that it has significantly improved power efficiency, with an over 50% improvement that leads to logner battery life which is fantastic for on-device AI applications.