Samsung P9 and P7: The First 8TB USB4 SSDs, and Cheaper Ways to Get There

Samsung unveiled the P9 and P7 portable SSDs at Gamescom on 26 August. They are the first portable SSDs to use USB4, the P9 reaches 4,000MB/s, and both come in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and, for the first time in a Samsung portable drive, 8TB. That last number is what everybody latched onto. It is also attached to a price of $2,699.99.

The interesting thing about this launch is not the speed. It is what the price list reveals about where storage has ended up. Three years ago Samsung's flagship 4TB portable SSD cost $439.99. The equivalent P9 today is $1,349.99, which is just over three times as much for the same capacity. And the volume discount that used to reward buying bigger has quietly vanished.

So this article does three things. It lays out exactly what the P9 and P7 cost and what you get. It works out whether these prices are a blip or the new shape of storage. And it puts the 8TB question side by side with six other ways to reach the same capacity, some of which are more than a thousand dollars cheaper.

The practical answer for most people is not one 8TB drive at all. It is several smaller drives you already own, plus a way to actually find things on them. That second part is what DriveVault does. It scans each drive once and builds a permanent, searchable catalogue of everything on it, so a shelf of drives behaves like one library whether or not anything is plugged in. Before spending $2,699.99 on capacity, it is worth knowing how much of the capacity you already own is sitting there duplicated.

What Samsung Actually Announced

Both drives use a USB4 interface at 40Gbps, which is a first for Samsung's portable line. Both share the same body, measuring 3.5 by 2.6 by 0.3 inches and weighing 0.22 pounds, and both are rated for drops of up to 2 metres along with shock and vibration testing. The global rollout begins in September, with Samsung noting that available capacities vary by market and some may arrive later.

The P9 is the flagship. Samsung rates it at up to 4,000MB/s sequential read and 3,800MB/s sequential write, roughly double the 2,000MB/s ceiling of the outgoing T9. Samsung describes its sustained write performance as sufficient for 12K direct recording, which is the meaningful claim here: plenty of drives post fast opening numbers and then collapse once their cache fills, and recording straight from a camera is the workload that exposes that. The P9 also took a CES 2026 Innovation Award, and Samsung calls it the world's first 8TB USB4 portable SSD capable of 4,000MB/s.

The P7 is the everyday drive. Same USB4 interface, same enclosure, same capacities, aimed at desktops, laptops, phones, consoles and cameras. Samsung emphasises durability rather than sustained throughput, and prices it around $400 lower at 8TB.

UK pricing had not been confirmed at the time of writing. European pricing for the P9 starts at €350.99, so expect UK figures broadly in line with the US numbers once they appear.

Look Again at That Table

Read down the per-terabyte columns. The P9 costs $340 per TB at 1TB and $337 per TB at 8TB. The P7 runs $290 at 1TB and $286 at 8TB. Buying the biggest drive Samsung makes saves you roughly one percent per terabyte over buying the smallest.

That is not how storage has ever worked. Here is the T9 line from October 2023 for comparison:

Two things happened. The T9 gave you a real reward for buying up: $140 per TB at the bottom, $110 at the top, a 21% discount for going large. That reward has disappeared. And the absolute number has moved from $110 per TB to $337, which is three times more expensive for the same 4TB of flagship portable storage in under three years.

The vanished capacity discount is the more revealing of the two. Historically a chunk of a drive's price was the controller, the enclosure, the cable and the engineering, all of which are fixed costs you spread across more terabytes as capacity goes up. When flash itself is cheap, that spreading is where the discount comes from. When flash becomes the overwhelming majority of the bill of materials, there is nothing left to spread, and price scales almost linearly with capacity.

That is exactly what the P Series price list shows. Samsung is essentially selling you NAND at cost plus a margin, and the enclosure has become a rounding error.

Is This the Future of Storage?

For the next couple of years, broadly yes. Longer term, probably not.

The cause is well documented and it is not specific to Samsung. Since late 2025, DRAM and NAND manufacturers have redirected capacity toward AI data centres, and consumer supply collapsed behind it. Every major PC maker raised prices in response, Apple pushed the Mac mini's entry point up by 50% in under two years, and Gartner coined the term "memflation" for the effect. We went through the mechanics of it in our storage price surge explainer and the knock-on effect on Apple hardware in the Mac Studio buyer's guide.

On timing, the analyst consensus has been consistent and unwelcome. Gartner does not forecast meaningful relief inside 2026. SK hynix's chief executive said in July that 2027 would be the worst supply year in the industry's history. New fabs take two to three years from announcement to volume production, and the capacity announced in 2026 will not produce chips until 2028. Late 2027 is the earliest credible window for normalisation.

The reason this is probably not permanent is that the underlying flash technology has not stopped improving. Layer counts keep rising and cost per bit keeps falling on a manufacturing basis. What has broken is allocation, not physics. When AI infrastructure demand plateaus or new capacity finally lands, consumer NAND pricing should ease considerably. The honest summary is that 8TB portable SSDs are here to stay, and today's prices for them are not.

Six Cheaper Ways to Get 8TB

The P9 is not the only way to put 8TB on your desk, and it is close to the most expensive. Here is what the finished-product market looked like in late August, with Apple's internal Mac Studio upgrade included at the top for scale and a desktop hard drive at the bottom for perspective.

Prices were compiled by AppleInsider on 27 August in its roundup of alternatives to Apple's storage upgrade, and SSD pricing moves quickly, so treat them as a snapshot rather than gospel. The shape of the table is the point.

Three observations worth drawing out.

The P9 is the second most expensive finished option on the list. Several drives beat it on both price and rated speed. The Glyph Atom EX80 claims 7,000MB/s for $300 less. The OWC Express 1M2 claims 6,000MB/s for $500 less. You are paying a premium for Samsung's sustained write engineering and brand, which is a legitimate thing to pay for if direct camera recording is your use case, and money wasted if it is not.

Building it yourself saves about $1,100. An OWC Express 1M2 80G enclosure costs $149.99 empty and takes a standard M.2 NVMe blade. Pair it with an 8TB Lexar NM790 at $1,449.99 and the total is $1,599.98. That is five screws, a thermal pad and a format in Disk Utility. Against Apple's $3,800 internal upgrade the same build saves $2,200.

One caveat on speed that applies to everything above. Thunderbolt 5 and USB4 2.0 advertise 80Gbps, but PCIe tunnelling caps at 64Gbps and protocol overhead puts real-world external SSD performance a little over 6GB/s. Thunderbolt 5's 120Gbps figure is a display bandwidth mode and does nothing for storage. Rated speeds on portable SSDs are opening-burst numbers, and what matters for long transfers is what happens after the cache fills. This is precisely where the P9 and the iodyne earn their keep, and where cheap drives quietly fall over.

Cheaper Ways Into Storage Generally

If the honest reason 8TB appeals is "I keep running out of space," a single expensive SSD is rarely the efficient answer. Four cheaper routes, roughly in order of how much they save.

1. Buy a hard drive for anything you are not editing

An 8TB desktop hard drive runs around $300, roughly a ninth of the P9. It gives you about 200MB/s instead of 4,000MB/s, which is genuinely disqualifying if you are cutting multicam 8K off the drive, and completely irrelevant if the drive holds finished projects you touch twice a year.

Most people's storage problem is archive volume, not working speed. Splitting the two is the single biggest saving available: keep a fast 2TB or 4TB SSD as the working scratch drive, and put everything finished onto cheap spinning capacity. Our budget external hard drive guide covers the reliable options, and the high-capacity archive guide goes further up the range.

2. Buy two 4TB drives instead of one 8TB

Because the capacity discount has evaporated, two 4TB P7s cost $2,299.98 against $2,289.99 for a single 8TB. That is a ten dollar penalty for splitting, and in exchange you get a spare drive, the ability to have one on set and one in the studio, and no single point of failure taking out 8TB of work at once. When per-terabyte pricing is flat, consolidating into one large drive stops making financial sense and starts being purely a convenience decision.

3. Reuse the blade from a drive you already have

If you have an older external SSD with a failing enclosure or a slow interface, the NVMe blade inside is often still fine. A $150 to $175 USB4 enclosure will bring it up to modern speeds. This is the same logic as the DIY build above, applied to hardware you already own.

4. Recover the space you already paid for

The cheapest terabyte is the one you already own and forgot about. Most people with several drives are carrying a surprising amount of duplication: the same shoot copied to two drives during a panic, an old project backed up twice, card dumps that were never cleared after the edit was delivered. Auditing that before buying is free.

Who Should Actually Buy a P9 or P7

The Part That Bites Later

Whichever route you take, you end up in the same place: more drives, holding more data, in more places. One 8TB SSD becomes an 8TB SSD plus the four drives it was supposed to replace, because nobody ever actually consolidates and wipes the originals. Two years later you have seven drives on a shelf and no reliable idea which one holds the November shoot.

That is the problem DriveVault exists for. Scan each drive once and you get a permanent catalogue of everything on it: the complete folder tree, filenames, sizes, dates, photo EXIF and video specifications. Search across every drive you own from a single window and it tells you which drive a file lives on and exactly where, with nothing plugged in.

It also makes the buying decision above a lot easier to get right. Seeing your whole library at once is how you find the duplication that means you need 4TB rather than 8TB. It is free for your first drive up to 4TB, and it runs entirely offline, so nothing about your files leaves your Mac.

The Verdict

The P9 and P7 are good drives arriving at a bad moment. USB4 in a portable SSD is a real step forward, 8TB in something the size of a credit card is a genuine engineering milestone, and Samsung's sustained write work is the sort of thing that separates a professional tool from a spec sheet. None of that is in doubt.

What is in doubt is whether you should buy one. At $2,699.99 the P9 is beaten on price by most of the market and beaten on rated speed by some of it, and the one thing it clearly leads on, sustained write for direct recording, matters to a narrow slice of buyers. The P7 at $2,289.99 is the better-judged product of the two, and even it sits mid-table.

As for whether this is the future of storage: the 8TB portable SSD is here to stay and that is worth being pleased about. The price is a snapshot of the worst storage market in over a decade, and it should not be read as the permanent cost of flash. If you can wait, wait. If you cannot, build it yourself and keep the $1,100. And either way, find out what is on the drives you already own before you buy another one.