990 Pro vs 9100 Pro vs Crucial T710: 2x Faster [2026]

SSD shoppers in September 2026 are stuck with a strange dilemma: two of the fastest consumer drives on the market sell for almost the same price, yet one of them tests nearly twice as fast as the other on paper. The Samsung 990 Pro (PCIe 4.0) and the Samsung 9100 Pro (PCIe 5.0) sit within about $10 of each other at the 2TB tier, while Crucial’s newest flagship, the Crucial T710, undercuts its own predecessor on power draw by more than a quarter. None of that tells you which drive actually makes your PC feel faster, and the honest answer depends less on brand loyalty than on what you do with the machine.

This comparison pulls specs straight from Samsung’s and Crucial’s own datasheets, cross-checks them against independent testing from Tom’s Hardware, KitGuru, ComputerBase, and TweakTown, and prices every drive at current September 2026 US retail. The goal is a straight answer to a question a lot of builders are asking right now: is it worth paying more for PCIe 5.0, or does the 990 Pro still make more sense with SSD prices climbing across the board?

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Why This SSD Decision Is Harder Than It Looks in Late 2026

Storage pricing has been volatile all year. NAND shortages pushed SSD prices up across nearly every tier in 2026, and DDR5 memory kits have seen even sharper spikes, so builders are more price-sensitive than usual about every component, including the drive. That backdrop matters here because the three SSDs in this comparison, the Samsung 990 Pro, the Samsung 9100 Pro, and the Crucial T710, span two full generations of NVMe technology and three very different price points depending on capacity.

The 990 Pro launched as Samsung’s PCIe 4.0 flagship and has spent years as the drive reviewers point to when someone asks for the fastest practical option for gaming and everyday productivity. The 9100 Pro is Samsung’s answer to PCIe 5.0, built to nearly double the 990 Pro’s sequential throughput. The Crucial T710 is newer still, a third-generation Gen5 drive from Crucial that replaces the T705 with a cooler, more efficient controller rather than just chasing bigger benchmark numbers.

Here is the part that surprises a lot of buyers: raw sequential speed rarely decides which drive feels faster in daily use. Game load times, application launches, and file operations depend far more on random 4K performance, controller efficiency, and how well Windows or your game engine actually uses that bandwidth. That is exactly what this comparison digs into, drive by drive.

Meet the Three Drives: Samsung 990 Pro, Samsung 9100 Pro, and Crucial T710

Before the numbers, it helps to know what each drive is actually trying to be. These are not three competitors chasing the same buyer. They represent three different points in the PCIe generational shift, and each one makes a different trade-off between speed, price, and heat.

Samsung 990 Pro: The PCIe 4.0 Benchmark

The 990 Pro runs on Samsung’s in-house Pascal controller paired with Samsung V-NAND TLC flash and an LPDDR4 DRAM cache. It is rated for sequential read speeds up to 7,450 MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 6,900 MB/s, according to Samsung’s own datasheet. Random performance tops out around 1.4 million IOPS for reads and 1.55 million IOPS for writes on the 2TB model. It ships in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, with endurance ratings of 600, 1,200, and 2,400 terabytes written respectively, backed by a five-year warranty, according to Samsung’s official 990 Pro product page.

Samsung 9100 Pro: Samsung’s PCIe 5.0 Flagship

The 9100 Pro moves to a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and, per Samsung’s official product listing, hits up to 14,700 MB/s sequential read and 13,300 to 13,400 MB/s sequential write depending on capacity. Random performance jumps to as much as 1.85 million IOPS read on the 1TB model and up to 2.2 million IOPS read on the 2TB and 4TB versions, with random writes rated up to 2.6 million IOPS across the line, per Samsung’s 9100 Pro product listing. It is available in the same 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities as the 990 Pro.

Crucial T710: The Newest, Most Efficient Gen5 Drive

The T710 is Crucial’s third-generation PCIe 5.0 drive, succeeding the T700 and T705. It swaps the T705’s Phison PS5026-E26 controller for a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller paired with Micron’s newer 276-layer TLC NAND. Crucial’s own product flyer rates the T710 at up to 14,900 MB/s sequential read and 13,800 MB/s sequential write, and, just as important, at 8.25 watts of power draw compared to the T705’s 11.25 watts, a 26.6% reduction Crucial states directly in its marketing materials. That efficiency gain, more than the top-line speed, is the T710’s real selling point.

Full Specs Comparison Table

Here is how all three drives stack up across the specifications that matter most for a buying decision.

Specification	Samsung 990 Pro	Samsung 9100 Pro	Crucial T710
Interface	PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe 2.0	PCIe 5.0 x4, NVMe 2.0	PCIe 5.0 x4, NVMe 2.0
Form Factor	M.2 2280	M.2 2280	M.2 2280
Controller	Samsung Pascal	Samsung in-house controller	Silicon Motion SM2508
NAND Flash	Samsung V-NAND TLC	Samsung V-NAND TLC	Micron 276-layer TLC
DRAM Cache	Yes, LPDDR4	Yes, LPDDR4	Yes, capacity-scaled
Max Sequential Read	7,450 MB/s	14,700–14,800 MB/s	Up to 14,900 MB/s
Max Sequential Write	6,900 MB/s	13,300–13,400 MB/s	Up to 13,800 MB/s
Random Read (4K)	Up to 1.4M IOPS	Up to 2.2M IOPS	Not published by Crucial
Random Write (4K)	Up to 1.55M IOPS	Up to 2.6M IOPS	Not published by Crucial
Rated Power Draw	Lower (PCIe 4.0 class)	Higher (PCIe 5.0 class)	8.25W (down from 11.25W on T705)
Capacities	1TB, 2TB, 4TB	1TB, 2TB, 4TB	1TB, 2TB, 4TB
Endurance (1TB/2TB/4TB)	600 / 1,200 / 2,400 TBW	Not matched to 990 Pro’s published figures	Not directly published for T710
Warranty	5 years	5 years	5 years
Predecessor	980 Pro	990 Pro (different generation)	T705
Launch Window	2023	2025	2026

A few rows are marked as unpublished rather than filled with a guess. Samsung has not put a 9100 Pro endurance figure next to the 990 Pro’s 600/1,200/2,400 TBW ratings in the materials this comparison reviewed, and Crucial’s T710 flyer emphasizes power efficiency over 4K IOPS numbers. Treat those gaps as a reminder to check the current datasheet before you buy, not as a knock against either drive.

Sequential Speed: Where the Generational Gap Is Obvious

The headline number in any SSD comparison is sequential throughput, and this is where the PCIe generation gap shows up hardest. The 990 Pro caps out at 7,450 MB/s read, while the 9100 Pro and T710 both clear 14,700 MB/s, roughly double. That is not a marketing exaggeration. Samsung’s own 9100 Pro brochure and Crucial’s T710 flyer both publish those numbers directly, and they line up with what PCIe 5.0’s doubled bus bandwidth over PCIe 4.0 should theoretically deliver.

Sequential write tells a similar story: 6,900 MB/s on the 990 Pro versus 13,300 to 13,800 MB/s on the two Gen5 drives. If your workload genuinely saturates sequential bandwidth, large video exports, big game installs copied from an external drive, or archiving huge datasets, the difference is real and measurable with any basic benchmarking tool.

What sequential numbers do not tell you is how a drive feels during normal use, which is why this comparison does not stop here.

Random 4K Performance: The Number That Actually Matters Day to Day

Random 4K read and write performance governs how quickly an OS boots, how fast a game loads textures, and how responsive an application feels when it is pulling thousands of small files instead of one giant sequential stream. This is where the 9100 Pro’s advantage over the 990 Pro is smaller in percentage terms but still meaningful: up to 2.2 million IOPS random read versus the 990 Pro’s 1.4 million, a jump of roughly 57%, well short of the near-2x gap in sequential numbers.

Crucial has not published matching 4K IOPS figures for the T710 in the flyer this comparison sourced, which makes an apples-to-apples random-performance claim impossible to state responsibly. Independent reviewers who have benchmarked the drive with tools like PCMark 10 and 3DMark Storage are the better source for that number, and TweakTown’s own T710 testing focused on full-system PCMark 10 scores rather than isolated 4K IOPS, a detail worth knowing if you are comparing spec sheets side by side.

The practical takeaway: the jump from PCIe 4.0 to PCIe 5.0 helps random performance, but nowhere near as dramatically as the sequential numbers suggest. That gap between marketing spec and lived experience is the single most important thing to understand before paying a premium for a Gen5 drive.

Controller and NAND Architecture Explained

Every generational leap in SSD performance traces back to two things: the controller chip and the NAND flash behind it. The 990 Pro’s Samsung Pascal controller pairs with Samsung’s own V-NAND TLC flash, a combination Samsung has refined since the original 980 Pro. It is a known quantity with a long track record of stability.

The 9100 Pro uses an in-house Samsung controller built for PCIe 5.0 bandwidth, again matched with Samsung V-NAND TLC. Samsung’s decision to keep everything in-house, rather than sourcing a third-party PCIe 5.0 controller, mirrors the approach it took with earlier Pro-series drives and helps explain why the 9100 Pro tends to run cooler than some competing Gen5 drives built around Phison’s higher-power controllers.

Crucial took a different route with the T710. Instead of sticking with the Phison PS5026-E26 controller that powered the T705, Crucial switched to a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller and moved from Micron’s 232-layer NAND to newer 276-layer TLC. That combination is what let Crucial cut power draw by 26.6% while pushing sequential speeds slightly higher than the T705 could manage. It is a controller swap built around efficiency, not just raw throughput, and it shows in the thermal behavior reviewers have reported.

Pricing Breakdown: What You Actually Pay Per Capacity

Street prices as of September 2026, gathered from Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg listings and cross-checked against Tom’s Hardware’s ongoing SSD deals tracker, tell a more interesting story than any spec sheet.

Capacity	Samsung 990 Pro	Samsung 9100 Pro	Crucial T710
1TB	$239.99 (Amazon)	$249.99 (Best Buy)	~$424.66 (Best Buy)
2TB	$389.99 (Amazon/Best Buy/Newegg)	$399.99 (Amazon/Newegg)	Not independently price-tracked at publish time
4TB	$969.00–$979.99 (Best Buy/Amazon)	$1,248.75 (Best Buy)	Not independently price-tracked at publish time
Approx. $/GB (2TB tier)	~$0.195/GB	~$0.20/GB	~$0.42/GB (1TB tier)

The number that should stop most shoppers in their tracks is the 2TB comparison: $389.99 for the 990 Pro versus $399.99 for the 9100 Pro, a gap of just $10 for a drive that tests at roughly double the sequential speed and 57% higher random read performance. That is an unusually small premium for a full PCIe generation jump, and it is the strongest argument in this entire comparison for skipping the 990 Pro and going straight to the 9100 Pro if you are buying new anyway.

The T710 sits in a different bracket entirely. At roughly $425 for 1TB, it costs about 77% more than the 990 Pro’s 1TB model and 70% more than the 9100 Pro’s 1TB model. That premium buys Crucial’s newest controller and NAND generation along with the best power efficiency of the three, but it is a harder number to justify unless you specifically value that efficiency or you are building a system where thermal headroom is tight, like a small-form-factor PC or a laptop upgrade.

How the 2026 NAND Shortage Is Shaping This Purchase

None of these three drives exist in a pricing vacuum this year. NAND flash and DRAM shortages have rattled the entire PC components market through 2026, pushing memory kit prices up sharply and dragging SSD pricing along with them at nearly every tier. That context matters for anyone reading this comparison and wondering why a 990 Pro that once looked like a mid-cycle discount darling now sits closer to $240 for a single terabyte.

It also explains why the pricing gap between the 990 Pro and the 9100 Pro has compressed to roughly $10 at the 2TB tier instead of the wider premium PCIe 5.0 drives commanded when they first launched. Component shortages tend to compress margins across a manufacturer’s entire lineup rather than protecting flagship pricing, and Samsung’s own retail listings reflect that: both drives have moved in price together over the past several months rather than the newer drive holding a large fixed premium.

For builders timing a purchase, that means the usual advice, wait for prices to drop, carries more risk than it normally would. If NAND supply stays tight into 2027, as some industry analysts have warned, current street prices for all three of these drives could look like a bargain in hindsight rather than a peak to wait out. That is not a reason to panic-buy, but it is a reason to weigh a purchase now against the specific risk of further NAND-driven price increases rather than assuming storage will simply get cheaper the way it has in most previous years.

Endurance, Warranty, and Long-Term Reliability

All three drives carry a five-year warranty, which is standard for this tier of consumer SSD. The 990 Pro’s endurance ratings are the clearest of the three: 600 terabytes written for the 1TB model, 1,200 TBW for 2TB, and 2,400 TBW for 4TB, straight from Samsung’s published datasheet. Those numbers translate to years of heavy daily writes for a typical gaming or productivity PC, and most owners will replace the drive for capacity reasons long before hitting the endurance ceiling.

Samsung has not published a directly comparable TBW table for the 9100 Pro alongside the 990 Pro’s figures in the materials available for this comparison, and Crucial’s T710 flyer likewise emphasizes power draw over endurance numbers. That is not unusual for newly launched flagship drives, where marketing tends to lead with the headline speed and efficiency claims first. If endurance under sustained heavy write workloads is a priority, such as running a drive in a workstation doing constant video ingest, checking the manufacturer’s current datasheet for your exact SKU before buying is worth the five minutes it takes.

To put the 990 Pro’s endurance numbers in perspective, 600 TBW on the 1TB model means writing roughly 328GB to the drive every single day for five straight years before hitting the rated ceiling, a workload far beyond what a typical gaming or productivity PC generates. Even a heavy user recording gameplay footage, editing photos, and running frequent game installs and uninstalls would struggle to approach that number inside the drive’s five-year warranty window. That is worth remembering before endurance ratings alone push a buying decision toward one drive over another. Capacity and controller behavior under sustained load matter more for most people than the TBW figure printed on the box.

Power Draw and Thermal Requirements

This is where the T710’s engineering choices pay off most clearly. Crucial states the T710 draws 8.25 watts compared to 11.25 watts for the outgoing T705, a 26.6% reduction the company backs with its own product literature. Less power draw means less heat to dissipate, which in turn means less dependence on an aggressive heatsink to sustain peak speeds during long transfers.

The 990 Pro, running on PCIe 4.0, is the easiest of the three to cool simply because it moves less data per second and draws less power doing it. It is a comfortable fit in most PS5 heatsink setups and small-form-factor builds without special consideration.

The 9100 Pro, as a PCIe 5.0 drive from Samsung, runs hotter under sustained load than the 990 Pro and benefits from a substantial motherboard M.2 heatsink, particularly during long sequential writes where thermal throttling can eat into the drive’s rated speed advantage. Reviewers who have tested earlier Gen5 drives from other brands, including the T705 that the T710 replaces, have flagged similar behavior: a Phison E26-class controller in particular can run hot enough that a thin heatsink is not enough to sustain peak throughput for more than a few seconds. That is part of why Crucial’s move to the cooler-running SM2508 controller in the T710 matters more than the modest sequential speed bump over the T705.

Do PCIe 5.0 SSDs Actually Load Games Faster? What Reviewers Found

Tom’s Hardware and KitGuru’s Real-World Testing

This is the question that matters most to the gaming audience reading a comparison like this one, and the honest answer is: usually not by much. KitGuru’s testing of the Crucial T705, the T710’s direct predecessor and a drive that shares similar real-world behavior, recorded an average of 1,299 MB/s across three game-load benchmarks using 3DMark’s Storage suite, with individual results ranging from 1,827 MB/s in Battlefield V down to just 747 MB/s in Overwatch. Those numbers sit nowhere close to the drive’s 14,000-plus MB/s rated sequential speed, because game loading is dominated by small-file access patterns, CPU decompression work, and engine-level bottlenecks rather than raw sequential bandwidth.

Tom’s Hardware, which has reviewed the T705 directly, has made the same point across its broader SSD coverage: synthetic sequential numbers more than double moving from a PCIe 4.0 flagship to a PCIe 5.0 one, but the practical experience of loading a game level or launching an application closes most of that gap. A drive rated twice as fast on paper might load a game only a second or two quicker than a well-built PCIe 4.0 drive like the 990 Pro, if the difference is even perceptible at all.

RottenWifi’s Efficiency-Focused T710 Review

RottenWifi’s review of the T710 frames the drive around full-system responsiveness rather than isolated game-load benchmarks, testing how it performs across a realistic mix of office work, file operations, and sustained transfers. That kind of full-system evaluation is arguably more representative of what most buyers will actually feel day to day than a synthetic sequential-throughput chart, and it is part of why the review’s own verdict called the T710 “a genuinely high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD that combines exceptional peak throughput with a better power and thermal profile than Crucial’s earlier T705.” A drive that hits similar real-world scores while running cooler and drawing less power is, for most buyers, the more meaningful upgrade than one that only wins on a spec sheet.

The pattern across all this independent testing is consistent: buy a PCIe 5.0 drive for large sequential workloads where the bandwidth genuinely gets used, not for the promise of dramatically faster game loading.

PS5, Xbox, and Console Compatibility

The PlayStation 5’s expansion slot supports PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives, and Sony’s minimum sequential read requirement of 5,500 MB/s is comfortably cleared by all three drives in this comparison. The 990 Pro, with a proper low-profile heatsink, is a well-established PS5 upgrade path that plenty of owners already run without issue.

The 9100 Pro and T710, being PCIe 5.0 drives, will work in a PS5 slot but run at PCIe 4.0 speeds because that is the ceiling the console’s controller supports. In practice, that means paying a premium for bandwidth the console cannot use. Neither Samsung nor Crucial markets these Gen5 drives specifically as PS5 upgrades, and reviewers generally steer PS5 owners toward PCIe 4.0 options like the 990 Pro instead, reserving the 9100 Pro and T710 for PCIe 5.0-capable desktop motherboards where the extra bandwidth actually gets used.

Xbox Series X and Series S still rely on proprietary expansion cards rather than standard M.2 slots for official storage expansion, so none of these three drives install directly without a separate internal-swap approach that voids warranty protections. That leaves this comparison firmly in PC and PS5 territory.

Laptop compatibility is worth a separate note. Most consumer laptops, even recent high-end gaming models, still ship with PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, which means a 9100 Pro or T710 dropped into one of those machines will run capped at PCIe 4.0 speeds, similar to the console scenario. Before buying either Gen5 drive for a laptop upgrade, check the manufacturer’s specification sheet for the exact M.2 slot generation rather than assuming a recent purchase automatically includes PCIe 5.0 support, since that detail is inconsistently advertised across laptop model pages.

Real-World Examples: Who’s Actually Buying These Drives

Specs only mean so much until you map them to an actual workflow. Here is how these three drives play out for the kinds of buyers actually shopping this category in late 2026.

• The PS5 owner running out of space: A 990 Pro 2TB with a compatible heatsink adds a full game library’s worth of room at $389.99, comfortably clears Sony’s speed requirement, and never wastes bandwidth the console cannot use.
• The new PC builder buying a PCIe 5.0 motherboard anyway: Since the 9100 Pro costs only about $10 more than the 990 Pro at the 2TB tier, there is little reason not to take the 9100 Pro if the motherboard already supports PCIe 5.0.
• The video editor working with 8K RAW or ProRes footage: Large sequential transfers are exactly the workload where the 9100 Pro’s and T710’s near-doubled throughput translates into real time saved during export and file copying.
• The small-form-factor builder with limited airflow: The T710’s 8.25W power draw and cooler-running SM2508 controller make it the safer Gen5 pick in a cramped mini-ITX case where a hot Phison E26-class drive might throttle.
• The competitive gamer upgrading purely for load times: Based on KitGuru’s and Tom’s Hardware’s real-world testing, the 990 Pro remains the more cost-effective choice, since the jump to PCIe 5.0 rarely produces a load-time improvement worth the price premium.
• The workstation user handling large AI model checkpoints or datasets locally: The 9100 Pro’s higher random IOPS and sequential bandwidth help when repeatedly loading multi-gigabyte files into memory, a workload where the 990 Pro’s PCIe 4.0 ceiling becomes a genuine bottleneck.

Five Use-Case Recommendations: Which Drive Fits Your Workflow

Boiling the whole comparison down, here is the recommendation for five common buyer profiles.

• Best overall value: Samsung 990 Pro. At $239.99 for 1TB and $389.99 for 2TB, it remains the drive most reviewers point to for gaming and general productivity where PCIe 5.0’s extra bandwidth goes unused.
• Best PCIe 5.0 upgrade for the price: Samsung 9100 Pro. The $10 premium over the 990 Pro at 2TB, paired with a near-doubled sequential speed and a meaningful random IOPS jump, makes this the easiest Gen5 recommendation in this comparison.
• Best for power-constrained builds: Crucial T710. The 26.6% power reduction over the T705 and a cooler-running Silicon Motion controller make it the safer pick for compact cases and laptops with limited thermal headroom.
• Best for PS5 storage expansion: Samsung 990 Pro. It clears Sony’s speed requirement with room to spare, costs less than either Gen5 option, and does not waste bandwidth the console cannot use.
• Best for content creators moving huge files daily: Samsung 9100 Pro or Crucial T710. Either Gen5 drive cuts real time off large sequential transfers, a workload where the specification-sheet advantage actually shows up in the stopwatch.

Migration Guide: Moving From a PCIe 4.0 to a PCIe 5.0 SSD

Switching from a 990 Pro to a 9100 Pro or T710, or adding either as a second drive, follows a fairly standard process. Here is the rundown for a clean migration.

1. Confirm your motherboard actually has a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot before buying. Running a Gen5 drive in a Gen4 slot works fine but caps it at Gen4 speeds, erasing the reason to pay the premium.
2. Back up your existing drive fully before starting. A full disk image, not just a copy of personal files, makes recovery painless if anything goes wrong mid-migration.
3. Update your motherboard’s BIOS to the latest version. Early PCIe 5.0 support on many boards shipped with bugs that firmware updates have since resolved.
4. Use cloning software, such as Samsung’s own Magician software for a Samsung-to-Samsung move or Crucial’s Acronis-based tool for the T710, to clone the old drive to the new one directly.
5. Install the new drive in the fastest available M.2 slot, checking your motherboard manual since not every M.2 slot runs at full PCIe 5.0 or even full PCIe 4.0 bandwidth.
6. Attach the drive’s heatsink, or your motherboard’s integrated M.2 heatsink, before closing the case. Skipping this step is the single most common cause of a new Gen5 drive underperforming its rated speed.
7. Boot into BIOS and confirm the drive is detected at the correct PCIe generation and lane width before booting into Windows.
8. Run a quick benchmark pass with CrystalDiskMark or a similar tool to confirm the drive is hitting close to its rated sequential and random numbers before trusting it with daily use.
9. Once everything checks out, securely wipe and repurpose the old drive as secondary storage rather than letting it sit unused.

For builders who want to verify a drive is actually running at full PCIe 5.0 link speed rather than trusting Windows alone, a quick command-line check confirms the negotiated link speed and width directly from the OS.

# Windows PowerShell: check NVMe link speed and negotiated PCIe generation
Get-PnpDevice -Class DiskDrive | Where-Object {$_.FriendlyName -like "*NVMe*"} | Select-Object FriendlyName, Status

# Linux: confirm negotiated PCIe link speed and width for an NVMe drive
sudo lspci -vv -s $(readlink -f /sys/block/nvme0n1/device/device | grep -oP '[0-9a-f]{2}:[0-9a-f]{2}\.[0-9a-f]') | grep -i "LnkSta"

If the reported link speed comes back lower than expected, for example a 9100 Pro negotiating at PCIe 4.0 instead of 5.0, the most common causes are an unsupported M.2 slot, a BIOS setting that needs updating, or a slot that shares lanes with another component like a secondary GPU slot.

Pros and Cons of Each Drive

Samsung 990 Pro

• Pro: Lowest price per gigabyte of the three drives at every capacity tested
• Pro: Easiest to cool, with no need for an aggressive heatsink
• Pro: Clearly published, industry-leading endurance ratings at 600/1,200/2,400 TBW
• Con: PCIe 4.0 ceiling means it cannot take advantage of newer PCIe 5.0 motherboards
• Con: Roughly half the sequential throughput of both Gen5 drives on paper

Samsung 9100 Pro

• Pro: Only a small price premium over the 990 Pro despite nearly double the sequential speed
• Pro: Highest random 4K IOPS of the three drives, based on Samsung’s published figures
• Pro: Five-year warranty matching the 990 Pro
• Con: Runs hotter than the 990 Pro and benefits from a substantial heatsink
• Con: Endurance ratings are not published in a directly comparable format to the 990 Pro

Crucial T710

• Pro: Best power efficiency of the three, at 8.25W versus the outgoing T705’s 11.25W
• Pro: Newest controller and NAND generation among the three drives
• Pro: Cooler-running Silicon Motion SM2508 controller reduces thermal throttling risk
• Con: Highest price per gigabyte by a wide margin, roughly 70-77% more than the Samsung options at 1TB
• Con: Limited independent 2TB and 4TB pricing data available at publish time

The Verdict: Which SSD Should You Actually Buy

There is no single winner here, and that is the honest takeaway. For a PS5 upgrade or a budget-conscious PC build, the Samsung 990 Pro remains the smartest purchase in this entire comparison. It costs less at every capacity, needs no special cooling consideration, and its PCIe 4.0 bandwidth already exceeds what most games and applications can meaningfully use.

For anyone building a new PC around a PCIe 5.0 motherboard, the Samsung 9100 Pro is the easiest recommendation to make. A roughly $10 premium over the 990 Pro at the 2TB tier, in exchange for nearly double the sequential throughput and a real jump in random IOPS, is close to a free upgrade. That price gap is unusually narrow for a full generational leap in storage technology, and it will not necessarily stay that small as 9100 Pro supply matures.

The Crucial T710 is the drive for a specific kind of buyer: someone who has already decided they want the newest PCIe 5.0 technology and cares more about power efficiency and thermal headroom than about price per gigabyte. Its 26.6% power reduction over its own predecessor is a genuinely useful engineering improvement, not just a marketing number, but it commands a real premium over both Samsung options that only makes sense if efficiency is a priority for your specific build.

The single most important lesson from this comparison, though, is not about any one drive. It is that sequential speed on a spec sheet and the way a computer actually feels day to day are two different things. Independent testing from KitGuru and Tom’s Hardware makes clear that game-load times barely move between a PCIe 4.0 flagship and a PCIe 5.0 one, so buy the bandwidth for the workload that actually uses it, not for the number at the top of the box.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Samsung 9100 Pro worth it over the 990 Pro for gaming?
Only marginally for load times, based on independent testing of comparable PCIe 5.0 drives. Given the roughly $10 price difference at the 2TB tier, it is a reasonable buy if your motherboard already supports PCIe 5.0, but it is not a load-time transformation.

Does the Crucial T710 completely replace the T705?
Crucial continues selling the T705 at reduced pricing rather than discontinuing it outright, but the T710 is the current flagship and the drive Crucial recommends for new PCIe 5.0 builds, thanks to its cooler-running controller and lower power draw.

Do I need a PCIe 5.0 motherboard to use the 9100 Pro or T710?
No, both drives are backward compatible with PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 slots, but they will only reach their rated PCIe 5.0 speeds in a slot that supports that standard. In an older slot, they perform closer to a PCIe 4.0 drive.

Will these SSDs work in a PlayStation 5?
All three exceed Sony’s 5,500 MB/s minimum sequential read requirement with the right heatsink. The 990 Pro is the more sensible PS5 choice since the console’s PCIe 4.0 interface cannot use the extra bandwidth the two Gen5 drives offer.

How much faster is PCIe 5.0 in real-world use, not just benchmarks?
Independent game-load testing from KitGuru found real-world results far below rated sequential speeds, with game-specific load benchmarks ranging from about 747 MB/s to 1,827 MB/s regardless of a drive’s 14,000-plus MB/s rated ceiling. Large sequential transfers like video exports show the generational gap far more clearly than game loading does.

What heatsink do I need for these drives?
The 990 Pro works fine with a basic low-profile heatsink or a PS5-compatible model. The 9100 Pro and T710 both benefit from a substantial motherboard M.2 heatsink to sustain peak speeds during long writes, though the T710’s cooler-running controller makes it somewhat less demanding than typical Phison-based PCIe 5.0 drives.

Is the 990 Pro still worth buying in 2026?
Yes, particularly for PS5 upgrades and budget-conscious PC builds. At $239.99 for 1TB and $389.99 for 2TB, it remains one of the best-value high-performance drives on the market, and its PCIe 4.0 ceiling still exceeds what most games and everyday applications require.

Which drive has the best price per gigabyte?
The Samsung 990 Pro, at roughly $0.195 per gigabyte at the 2TB tier, edges out the 9100 Pro’s approximately $0.20 per gigabyte. The Crucial T710, at roughly $0.42 per gigabyte at the 1TB tier based on current Best Buy pricing, is the most expensive of the three by a wide margin.

Should I wait for prices to drop before buying any of these drives?
Not necessarily. Ongoing NAND and DRAM shortages through 2026 have kept storage pricing elevated and volatile rather than steadily falling the way it typically has in past years. If one of these drives fits a build you are finishing now, current street pricing is a reasonable point to buy rather than a peak to wait out.