If you thought Kingston's new HyperX Predator SSD is fast, wait until you see what Samsung has in store for you. During CES 2015, a heap of new specifications for the SM951 became available, and we'd like to tell you about it because Samsung has started mass producing this baby.
The SSD will come in capacities ranging from 128 GB through 512 GB, and it measures 80 x 22 mm (this is the M.2 2280 form factor). Compared to its predecessor, the XP941, the SM951 now communicates into a 4x PCI-Express 3.0 signal. It still drops into the M.2 socket. Among its new features is also an L1.2 low-power mode, which brings the standby consumption of the unit down to a negligible 2 mW. Samsung also boasts that the SSD only needs about one watt to transfer 450 MB/s when reading, or 250 MB/s when writing.
Samsung said that over PCI-Express 2.0, the drive will manage to read at up to 1600 MB/s and write at up to 1350 MB/s. Over PCI-Express 3.0 it goes a step further, though, bringing those numbers up to 2150 MB/s and 1550 MB/s for sequential reading and writing, respectively. Random read IOPS sit at 130,000 and random write IOPS at 85,000. This is some seriously fast performance.
When we said that you should wait to see what Samsung has in store for you, though, we lied. The SSDs won't be coming to shops, but will only be available to OEMs. We therefore can't quote pricing or availability either, but we can tell you to sit back and await some very high-end storage performance from various upcoming notebooks. Given this level of performance, though, we are definitely a little sad that it won't be available through ordinary retail channels.
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