Samsung’s Newest PCIe SSD Sips Power, Cranks It To ‘Ludicrous Speed’
Kingston first showed off its HyperX Predator PCIe SSD back at CES 2014, and this year at CES 2015 announced that it would finally be available this quarter. We were duly impressed, as the SSD promised read speeds of 1,400 MB/s and write speeds of 1,000 MB/s.
However, Samsung has just announced a new PCIe-based SSD that is making my eyes water with joy and anticipation. Let’s first start off with the entrée. The new SM951 supports both PCIe 2.0 and PCIe 3.0 interfaces, with the former providing performance levels that are mind-boggling. Using the PCIe 2.0 interface, the SM951 can deliver sequential read and write speeds of 1,600 MB/s and 1,350 MB/s.
According to Samsung, those performance numbers are roughly 30 percent better than the previous generation XP941. Random reads and writes are nothing to sneeze at either, coming in at 130,000 and 85,000 IOPS respectively.
If you liked the entrée, you’ll love the main course. The SM951’s PCIe 3.0 support sends performance through the roof. When using a compatible machine, the SM951 is capable of 2,150 MB/s reads and 1,550 MB/s writes. And that’s not all, the SSD employees a L1.2 low power standby mode that allows it to barely sip power when machine is sleeping or in hibernation mode. As a result, stand power consumption is rated at under 2mW, which represents a 97 percent decrease from the L1 mode (50 mW).
Outstanding performance coupled with less strain on laptop batteries — where do I sign up?
The SM951 uses a PCIe (M.2) interface and has just entered mass production. While we don’t have an exact date for when you’ll be able to get your hands on these SSDs, we do know that they will be available in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities.
