South Korean electronics company Samsung has announced this week that it would be mass producing the SM951, a high-performance, low-powered PCIe* solid state drive (SSD) and is targeting the ultra-slim notebook PC and workstation market.
According to the company, the 80mm x 22mm component has several improvements over its predecessor as well as competing products, including an increase in speed of 30 per cent over the Samsung XP941, as well as being “three times faster” than other SATA-based SSDs.
In numbers, based on PCIe 2.0., the component has a sequential read speed of 1,600MB per second and a write speed of 1,350MB per second with random read and write speeds of up to 130,000 and 85,000 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second) respectively.
On PCIe 3.0, which the component also supports, the numbers jump to read and write speeds of 2,150MB per second and 1,550 MB per second, approximately four times faster than current SATA SSDs.
“With a PCIe 3.0 interface, the drive achieves substantially higher energy efficiency, requiring only about 450MB/s per watt for sequential reading and 250MB/s per watt for sequential writing, which translates into a more than 50 percent of improvement in performance per watt over that of the XP941 SSD,” according to a Samsung release.
It added that the SM951 is the first SSD to adopt the L1.2 low power standby mode, which turns off all high-speed circuits when a PC sleeps or hibernates.