Samsung Starts Mass Producing Crazy Fast SM951 PCIe SSD for Laptops

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Low power SSD hits ultra high speeds (2,150MB/s reads, 1,550MB/s writes)

One of the biggest developments in the solid state drive market has been that of falling prices over the past couple of years. We hope that trend continues, though it's not the sole storyline -- there's also the transition to PCI Express, and with it comes much faster speeds than their SATA 6Gbps counterparts. How fast are we talking? Well, Samsung's SM951 SSD for ultra-slim laptops and workstations is rated to read and write data at up to 2,150MB/s, and 1,550MB/s, respectively.
Those figures represent ultra-slim laptops and workstations that choose to adopt the PCIe 3.0 interface. In those situations, Samsung says the SM951 is about four times faster at sequential reads than current SATA SSDs, while also remaining power efficient -- it requires about 450MB/s per watt for sequential reads and 250MB/s per watt for sequential writes, which is more than a 50 percent improvement over the XP941, its predecessor.
Samsung's drive also supports PCIe 2.0. When installed in PCIe 2.0 system, it can read and write data at up to 1,600MB/s and 1,350MB/s, respectively, along with random read speeds of up to 130,000 IOPS and random writes of up to 85,000 IOPS. That's still pretty darn fast.
"We are helping to accelerate growth of the ultra-slim notebook PC market with the introduction of this energy-efficient, high-speed PCIe SSD," said Jeeho Baek, Senior Vice President of Memory Marketing at Samsung Electronics. He added that, "We will continue to introduce next-generation high-density SSDs with improved performance and increased differentiation, as we further strengthen our business competitiveness in global SSD market."
Outside of raw speed, the SM951 is notable because it's the first SSD to adopt the L1.2 low power standby mode. This is a mode defined by the PCI-SIG standards body, which allows for all high-speed circuits to be switched off when a PC is in sleep or hibernation mode.
No word yet on cost, though Samsung says the SM951 comes in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities.
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