Samsung Electronics has started mass production of the industry’s first NVMe PCIe solid state drive (SSD) which has an M.2 form factor for use in PCs and workstations. The new SM951-NVMe features the industry’s most advanced performance figures, exceptionally low power use in standby mode and the most compact size of any NVMe SSD. The new NVMe-based SM951 SSD achieves sequential data read and write performance up to 2,260 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 1,600MB/s, respectively, while using Samsung’s leading-edge controller technology. These performance figures are the industry’s most advanced, with speeds four and three times faster than those of a typical SATA-based M.2 SSD which usually moves data at up to 540MB/s and 500MB/s, respectively.
The drive attains its high-speeds by using four 8 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) lanes (PCIe Gen 3.0 x4) of simultaneous data flow. This allows for a data transfer rate of 32Gbps and a maximum throughput of 4GB/s, giving the new drive a huge advantage over SATA-based M.2 SSDs, which can only transfer data up to 600MB/s. The SM951-NVMe can process 300,000 IOPS (Input Output Per Second), which is more than twice as fast as the 130,000 IOPS rate of its AHCI-based equivalent and more than three times faster than the 97,000 IOPS of a SATA-based SSD. The drive weighs less than 7 grams, which is lighter than two nickels and only a tenth the weight of a 2.5” SSD. Capacities are 512 gigabyte (GB), 256GB and 128GB. Samsung is also the first in the industry to announce that it has begun shipping NVMe SSDs to OEMs for the PC market.
