Samsung has announced that it has started mass producing the industry's first PCIe-based SSDs intended to be used in Ultrabooks. The SSDs, known as the Samsung XP941's, are some very high performance SSDs. They can go well past the limits of the common SATA3 interface.
The units feature sequential read speeds of up to 1400 MB/s -- nothing faster is possible over the PCIe 2.0 interface found in Ultrabooks. Hopefully, it won't be long until we get PCIe 3.0 versions, which should offer double the bandwidth, allowing for speeds up to 2800 MB/s.
"With the Samsung XP941, we have become the first to provide the highest performance PCIe SSD to global PC makers so that they can launch leading-edge ultra-slim notebook PCs this year," said Young-Hyun Jun, executive VP, memory sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics. "Samsung plans to continue timely delivery of the most advanced PCIe SSD solutions with higher density and performance, and support global IT companies providing an extremely robust computing environment to consumers."
The XP941 SSDs come in the M.2 form factor of 80 by 22 mm. They also weigh just six grams.
Units have already been shipped to a number of the major Ultrabook manufacturers, and the drives will come in capacities ranging from 128 GB to 512 GB. There has been no word on whether the units will be available through the retail channels or what they would cost.
Why is nobody building an affordable PCIe-based SSD for desktops yet?
