Samsung making PCIe-based SSDs for Ultrabook designs

by Mark Tyson on 17 June 2013, 15:43

Tags: Samsung (005935.KS), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)

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Samsung has started mass production of PCI-Express (PCIe) solid state drives. The South Korean industrial giant says the new range of drives is intended for “next-generation ultra-slim notebook PCs”. The new drives use the 80 x 22mm M.2 form factor and weigh only about 6 grams. As well as being very compact these new drives can offer about 2.5X more speed than current SATA based SSD solutions.

Samsung has christened the new lineup of PCIe SSD drives the ‘XP941’ range. We are told the drives started to ship to systems builders earlier this quarter. So far Samsung has provided notebook PC makers XP941 SSDs in capacities of 128, 256 and 512GB.

Small and mighty fast

The reduced size of the XP941 range will allow Ultrabooks to become even more thin and light or contain larger batteries/other components. The M.2 form factor, chosen for these PCIe drives, measures only 80mm x 22mm, occupying about a seventh of the volume of a 2.5-inch SSD drive. Also these drives are light, weighing approximately six grams, about a ninth of a conventional 2.5-inch SSD unit weight.

Turning to performance, Samsung says that the “XP941 delivers a level of performance that easily surpasses the speed limit of a SATA 6Gb/s interface”. Putting a figure to these speed claims the sequential read performance of an XP941 is said to be 1,400MB/s, equivalent to 500GB transferred in six minutes. For comparison Samsung says this is 2.5 times faster than the fastest SATA SSD and a traditional HDD would take over 40 minutes to complete the same task.

VR-Zone reports that a ‘teardown’ of the latest updated MacBook Air “showed a similar Samsung made PCIe SSD inside”. So Samsung’s best buddies in Cupertino may be one of the first companies to launch a computer with one of these zippy new light weight SSDs equipped.



HEXUS Forums :: 24 Comments

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Lets hope its not going to be a big price hike per Gb. Got plenty of PCIe slots free.
An SSD is basically RAM , right ?
OilSheikh
An SSD is basically RAM , right ?

To the point that they're both solid state storage devices. RAM is volatile and requires power to remember data and SSDs are non volatile and requires no power to remember data.
A laptop running off pcie ssd is gonna be super fast but yet very expensive.
Wonder if it's gonna have raid.
PCI ssds cost a lot so I bet that one that fits in a laptop will cost a stupid amount.