Samsung has filed two separate trademarks for what could very possibly be its next-gen Gen5 SSDs, the 990 EVO Plus & the 9100 PRO.
Samsung's Next-Gen SSDs In The Works As It Files 990 EVO Plus & 9100 PRO Trademarks, Gen5 Arriving Soon
It's been over a year since we first got our hands on the Gen5 SSDs and since then, the drives have reached some insane potential, hitting speeds of over 14.5 GB/s but while the majority of storage manufacturers have released their respective products, one of them is still silent and that's none other than Samsung.
Samsung's last drive was the 990 PRO which offers some of the fastest speeds on a Gen4 drive, rated at up to 7,450 MB/s. The drive also comes with an RGB-LIT heatsink and is positioned as the flagship product from the Korean tech-house however, the company has yet to talk about its new Gen5 updates. The company does have enterprise and datacenter class Gen5 products out in the market but for consumers, it looks like the best they have to offer is still based on the older Gen4 standard.
But despite no official word from Samsung itself, it looks like the company has silently trademarked two upcoming SSD products, one of which could potentially be the Gen5 update that we have been waiting for. According to Sammobile, Samsung trademarked its 990 EVO Plus & 9100 PRO SSDs at KIPRIS (Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service). The details don't reveal much but we can make some guesses.
The Samsung 990 EVO Plus might be a more mainstream solution that utilizes a design similar to the 990 PRO but in a DRAM-less configuration. Generally, the EVO and EVO Plus series are made as a cost-effective option. Meanwhile, the Samsung 9100 PRO naming scheme is new and could be a hint at the Gen5 solutions which we have long been waiting for. Samsung's Gen3 and Gen4 SSDs such as the 970 PRO and the 980 PRO were legendary storage devices in all regards and with the amount of time that Samsung is taking with its Gen5 storage solutions, we can expect them to offer a great overall solution once again.
Samsung will be leveraging its own in-house Gen5 SSD controller while the market mostly relies on Phison's E26 controller for high-end solutions and has only recently begun shifting to alternatives from InnoGrit and Maxio. Phison also has a more cost-effective and DRAM-less E31T controller that will be coming to Gen5 drives soon. It looks like Samsung has tried to wait out until the Gen5 SSD standard became more mainstream as even now, the Gen5 SSDs, despite offering double the read and write speeds, still don't offer much real-world performance benefits and there's also the issue of heat being produced with the majority of drives requiring large cooling solutions with some SSD makers even going the liquid-cooling route.
We can't wait to see Samsung's first entrance into the Gen5 SSD segment and we hope it will be well priced and well worth the wait.
