Samsung has announced their new crazy-fast and energy efficient PCIe SSD is now in mass production. Dubbed SM951, the drive is destined to go in ultra thin and light laptops, and when matched with devices that support PCIe 3.0 it is able to deliver read and write speeds of 2,150 MB/s and 1,550 MB/s. That’s roughly four times faster than the fastest SATA-based SSDs.
Paired with a PCIe 2.0 interface, the SM951 is still pretty quick with sequential speeds up to 1,600MB/s read and 1,350MB/s write and random performance of 130,000 IOPS read and 85,000 IOPS write. There’s no information on endurance but its predecessor, the XP941, was rated at 73TB.
Samsung also claims some major improvements in terms of efficiency. In fact, the drive is reportedly 50% more efficient than the XP941, with an energy efficiency of 450 MB/s per watt for sequential reading, and 250 MB/s per watt for sequential writing. Additionally, the SM951 is the first drive to support the new L1.2 low power standby mode that slashes the power consumption in sleep or hibernate mode by 97% -- from 50mW to under 2mW.
In practical terms what this means is it would allow for a laptop to stay in hibernation mode much longer, possibly even months.
The new drive will be available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacity options. Samsung hasn’t revealed much about the NAND chips being used besides saying it’s using are “10nm-class” MLC flash.
There's no word on pricing, though it's likely that at least initially these drives won't be sold directly to consumers but rather laptop manufacturers.
https://www.techspot.com/news/59344-samsung-first-pcie-30-ssd-enters-mass-production.html
