Product Spotlight: The Samsung P9 — the First 8TB USB4 Portable SSD
A USB4 interface roughly doubles what the previous-generation T9 could do, and this is the first drive in the lineup to pair that speed with 8TB of storage.
Samsung unveiled the P9 and P7 portable SSDs at Gamescom 2026, its next-generation follow-up to the widely used T-series drives, built around a straightforward, real upgrade: a move to USB4. The flagship P9 delivers sequential read speeds up to 4,000MB/s and write speeds up to 3,800MB/s — roughly double the previous-generation T9's ceiling — and ships in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB capacities, with the 8TB model billed as the world's first 8TB USB4 portable SSD at that speed class.
For a developer, that speed jump matters most for anything genuinely bottlenecked by storage throughput rather than by the interface itself: cloning and building against a large monorepo from external storage, running a local database or containers off an external drive when internal storage is tight, or moving large build artifacts and datasets between machines. USB4's bandwidth is also what actually unlocks the drive's rated speed — plugging a USB4 drive into an older USB 3.x port still works, just capped at that older port's much lower ceiling, so the speed claim assumes a genuinely USB4-capable machine on the other end.
The P9 also supports 12K direct recording, a spec aimed squarely at video professionals rather than software developers, and it earned a CES 2026 Innovation Award ahead of its Gamescom showcase. Samsung's sibling P7 model targets a different use case entirely — broader device compatibility and a 2-meter drop rating for travel and everyday use — at a lower price, rather than chasing the P9's top-line speed.
Pricing runs from $339.99 for the 1TB P9 up through $649.99 for 2TB, $1,349.99 for 4TB, and $2,699.99 for the 8TB flagship — a real premium over the previous T9 generation, and worth weighing against how much of that rated speed a given workflow will actually be able to use in practice, since not every task saturates a 4,000MB/s pipe. Global availability begins in September 2026, with some capacities rolling out to specific markets on a slightly staggered schedule.
For a developer who's genuinely storage-throughput-bound on a USB4-capable machine, the P9 is a real, current-generation upgrade over the T-series rather than an incremental spec bump. For anyone whose external drive mostly holds backups or infrequently accessed files, the previous generation's speeds — at a lower price — are still plenty, and the P9's premium is money spent on headroom most workflows won't touch.
Source: Samsung Newsroom — Samsung Showcases P9 and P7 SSDs Featuring USB4 at Gamescom 2026