Samsung has announced the start of mass production of its new generation of SSDs connected to the PCIe 5.0 interface. The PM9E1 SSD will be the first, but other versions will arrive, both those sold by Samsung to consumers at retail and those created for other manufacturers to integrate into their devices.

Samsung, as well as other big manufacturers (WD, Kingston, Kioxia…) they were in no hurry when jumping to Gen5 SSDs, even though they are the fastest on the market. Perhaps the problem of the high temperatures they reach and the need for active cooling. Or maybe need to run out of Gen4 stock. Or simply in the real world, their benefits are not that great compared to Gen4, but they increase their price per GB, which may discourage customers.

Samsung SSD PM9E1

Samsung lists key SSD attributes, including performance, storage capacity, energy efficiency and security, “were improved over their predecessors”. The company particularly highlighted the energy efficiency of more than 50% for longer battery life.

In terms of performance, and thanks to the use of an eight-channel PCIe 5.0 interface, the speed of sequential reading and writing has been doubled to 14.5 GB per second when reading and 13 Gbytes per second when writing.

The announcement does not mention specific specifications, but Samsung always uses its own components for its drives, so we expect a drive in the M.2 2280 format with support for the NVMe protocol, the latest generation of NAND flash memories of the V-NAND series and a specially created controller to extract the potential of the interface.

Finally, let’s say Samsung used its SPDM specification to deliver the technology “secure channel”“device verification” and “firmware tampering certification” that can help prevent supply chain attacks that involve tampering with or tampering with data stored in a product during manufacturing or distribution processes. Basically, more guarantees for third-party manufacturers to include it in their computers.

The Samsung SSD PM9E1 will soon be available in four versions depending on storage capacity, 500 GB, 1, 2 and 4 bytes. No price was provided.