Would the Samsung 9100 Pro SSD with heatsink fit in the Framework 16? Also does FW16 support PCIe 5.0?
Hey and welcome!
No, heatsinks don’t fit into the laptop, but it has thermal pads to conduct heat from SSDs to the chassis, so you don’t need a heatsink.
No, both CPU generations in Laptop 16 support up to PCIe 4 only. This is because PCIe 5 implementation consumes more power and doesn’t make much sense for a mobile device until the technology improves.
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I have a 4TB 9100 Pro in my FW16 (without the heatsink version) and it runs at PCIe 4.0 speeds. I have had no issues with it. Only reason I got it was because I found an incredible deal on a used one that I hopped on immediately. I have not see any discernible difference in performance vs the 990 Pro (which I had before).
The only slight difference i have noticed is the 9100 Pro manages the thermals better under heavy load and that could be just because the updated Presto controller is more efficient.
The 9100 Pro boots up slightly faster but that’s because it has double the cache as my 2TB 990 Pro so not really a unique feature as such.
Conclusion: I only got the 9100 Pro because I found one that was 40% off retail price for a used 4TB. If you find one at an incredible deal jump on it otherwise you are wasting money!
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I didn’t realize this was the reason, but I’m glad someone’s paying attention to that.
It’d be neat if I could use PCIE gen 5 speeds when connected to AC and gen 4 when on battery though. That sounds like the kind of thing that’d be likely to introduce bugs admittedly.
It’s already a thing with pcie4 dropping to 3 to save power.
The infrastructure to do pcie5 is quite a bit more expensive and power hungry than even pcie4 so it is often left out on mobile platforms outside of the extreme high end that is not really designed to be run on battery for long. I am sure we’ll see pcie5 on lower power devices in the future as they figure out how to optimize it.
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Oh really? That’s super cool actually, thanks for sharing. I’ve got way more respect for the platform now.