For two years the advice wrote itself: the Samsung 990 Pro was the smart-money Gen4 drive, and the 9100 Pro was the Gen5 flagship you paid a premium for and probably didn’t need. That advice is dead. As I write this, the 9100 Pro 2TB is $399.99 on Amazon and the 990 Pro 2TB is $389.99. Ten dollars. The NAND shortage that wrecked storage pricing this year flattened the gap between generations, and it quietly changed which drive an editor should buy.
I reviewed the 990 Pro back when it launched and it’s been in our builds ever since. This page is the head-to-head that post was never meant to be: which one goes in your editing rig in 2026, capacity by capacity.
The short answer
Desktop with a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot: buy the 9100 Pro 2TB, and either buy the heatsink version or use your motherboard’s M.2 cooler, because bare, this drive throttles. Laptop, PS5, or any Gen4 desktop: buy the 990 Pro, because a 9100 Pro in a Gen4 slot runs at 990 Pro speed and you paid extra for heat. Neither is a bad drive. In this market, the only real mistake is paying a spike price, and both lines have spiked to double these numbers within the past few months.
| Drive | Seq read/write | Price today | $/TB |
|---|---|---|---|
| 990 Pro 1TB | 7,450 / 6,900 MB/s | $239.99 | $240 |
| 990 Pro 2TB | 7,450 / 6,900 MB/s | $389.99 | $195 |
| 990 Pro 4TB | 7,450 / 6,900 MB/s | $824.95 (3rd-party seller) | $206 |
| 9100 Pro 1TB | 14,700 / 13,300 MB/s | $249.99 | $250 |
| 9100 Pro 2TB | 14,700 / 13,400 MB/s | $399.99 | $200 |
| 9100 Pro 4TB | 14,800 / 13,400 MB/s | $928 (low stock) | $232 |
| 9100 Pro 8TB | 14,800 / 13,400 MB/s | $1,977 | $247 |
Amazon prices, July 28, 2026. Storage has repriced monthly this year, so treat every number here as a snapshot and check the listing. For scale: the 9100 Pro 8TB sold for $749.99 last November. Same drive. That’s the market we’re shopping in.
What Gen5 actually buys you in an edit bay
The headline numbers say the 9100 Pro is twice as fast. For some parts of your day, it truly is. For the longest parts, it isn’t, and you should know which is which before spending anything.
Both drives are TLC with an SLC cache, which means they write at full speed until the cache runs out, then drop to the flash’s native rate. TechPowerUp measured the 990 Pro 2TB writing about 187GB at full tilt before falling to roughly 1.7 GB/s. The 9100 Pro 2TB runs near 12.9 GB/s for around 474GB, then lands at about 1.9 GB/s. Read those last two numbers again: past the cache, the Gen5 drive writes maybe 10 percent faster than the Gen4 drive. Dump a 600GB shoot onto either one and the finish-line difference is minutes, not multiples. Long single-file writes, big renders, giant exports: effectively a wash.
Where the 9100 Pro genuinely pulls away is reads and burst work. Cache and scratch files, multicam scrubbing, skimming through high-bitrate footage, and drive-to-drive copies that fit inside that 474GB window all run at speeds the 990 Pro physically can’t touch. Puget Systems’ Resolve guidance matches this shape: NVMe earns its keep on footage around 2,000 Mbps and up, and the one drive they always spec fast is the cache/scratch drive. That is exactly the drive the 9100 Pro was born to be. And if your timeline stutters on lower-bitrate footage, the fix is proxies, not a faster SSD.
Thermals: the heatsink is not optional
The 9100 Pro’s 5nm controller is efficient for what it does, but what it does is push 14 GB/s, and a bare 9100 Pro under sustained load hits 90°C and throttles. Samsung’s thermal protection then cuts reads to the 11,000 to 12,000 MB/s range, which is you paying Gen5 money for two-thirds of Gen5. With a heatsink, it peaks around 81°C and holds full speed. So: heatsink version, motherboard M.2 shield, or a $10 tower-style cooler. Any of the three works. One caution, because pricing on the heatsink SKUs drifts into silly territory (the 4TB heatsink model has floated as much as $300 over the bare drive): when the gap is more than about $20, buy the bare drive and add your own cooler.
Do you even have a Gen5 slot?
This question kills more 9100 Pro purchases than any benchmark. The full 14,800 MB/s needs a PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot wired to the CPU, and in 2026 that’s mostly an AMD story: X670E, B650E, X870, and X870E boards have one. Intel’s Z890 platform has Gen5 M.2 too, but it hangs off the chipset tile and tops out around 12 GB/s in practice. Older Z790 boards usually offer Gen5 M.2 only by stealing lanes from the GPU slot, which drops your graphics card to x8. Editors on those boards should think hard before doing that to their GPU. This is the same slot math we walk through in the VFX workstation guide and the Premiere hardware guide.
Laptops are blunter: PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots in laptops are close to nonexistent in mid-2026. The HP Omen Max 16 is the one mainstream machine we could confirm shipping one, and it caps that slot at 1TB drives. Every other editing laptop you’d actually buy is Gen4. A laptop editor who buys a 9100 Pro gets a hotter drive that runs at 990 Pro speed. Buy the 990 Pro and spend the change on cards or a backup drive.
Same logic for PS5 owners moonlighting as editors: the console is Gen4. The 990 Pro with heatsink drops right in; a 9100 Pro would run at Gen4 speed. Pointless spend.
Capacities, and one naming trap
The 990 Pro tops out at 4TB; the 9100 Pro adds an 8TB flagship. At 4TB the 9100 Pro runs about $100 over the 990 Pro, and stock on both is thin and third-party-flavored right now, so watch the seller line. The 2TB models are the sweet spot in both lines, and the only capacities with clean in-stock listings as I write this.
The naming trap: the 990 EVO and 990 EVO Plus are not junior 990 Pros. They’re a different, slower architecture wearing the same number, and thanks to shortage pricing the EVO Plus sometimes costs more than the actual 990 Pro. If the label doesn’t say Pro, it isn’t.
In conclusion
At a $10 gap, the old “Gen5 is an upsell” reflex is wrong. If your board has a real Gen5 slot, the 9100 Pro 2TB is the buy: same money, double the read speed where editing actually feels it, and a cache/scratch drive that will outlive your next GPU. Everyone else, and that’s every laptop and most desktops more than a year or two old, buys the 990 Pro 2TB and loses nothing. One more time for the people skimming: check the price the day you buy. This market has repriced these drives by 3x inside a year, in both directions.
And that’s it. My 990 Pro launch review stays up as the origin story; this page is the buying answer, and I’ll re-check the numbers as the shortage grinds on. If your build has a slot situation I didn’t cover, drop it in the comments.
