Check out this review. Actually compares the 9100 pro to an optane drive.
The Samsung 9100 Pro is a PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD that brings the performance crown back to Samsung with excellent performance
www.servethehome.com
This is an interesting chart, but I don't claim to understand what the different categories in SPECWorkstation (Product Development, Media & Entertainment, Life Sciences, Energy, General operations) actually mean and what they are doing and measuring in these tests.
The 9100 sure looks impressive though.
Compared to the drives I do have personal experience with (only the Optane p5800x, the Sabrent Rocket 4, and the WD Black SN850x) however, my own "real world" relative experience between these drives tracks most closely with the dark green bar, "Life Sciences" but I have no idea what a life sciences drive test actually is
The most intensive components of my own "real world" experiences typically includes stuff like "running operating system updates", "running game updates", "loading games", "running multiple VM's", "minimizing stutter during resource loads in open world games". Stuff like that.
Everything else I do is relatively light on the drives, and I probably couldn't tell the difference between any two SSD's, even Nvme and SATA.
If the green "life sciences" bar winds up holding up as a representation of the heaviest parts of my workloads (no guarantee it will), then the Optane is still king, BUT with a much smaller margin in the past, and with the margin being that small it certainly does not justify the ebay scarcity price premium for Optane drives anymore.
I spent almost ~$950 last year on my 800GB Optane DC p5800x, and about $450 a few months later on a 400GB Optane DC p5800x.
The extreme price premium of about ~$1.13 to $1.19 per GB in a world where you can get a decent high end consumer SSD drive for about $0.12 per GB seemed worth it just because no SSD - even the mighty Crucial T705 - was seeming like they were closing the gap at all.
Even if the Samsung 9100 doesn't beat the Optane DC p5800x at what I do, it certainly now seems like it now might get close enough that spending the kind of money I did on these Optane drives no longer makes sense, and that's honestly a bit surprising to me. For the longest time there it just did not seem like that would ever happen. Or at least not happen for a very long time.
I'm going to reserve judgment until I get some hands on experience and can test for myself, but it really looks like these Samsung 9100 drives get close enough to where spending crazy money on Optane drives no longer makes sense. And while it stings a little given the money I've spent on Optane drives in the not so distant past, overall that is a good thing. Progress!
