Monday, June 17th 2013

Samsung Now Mass Producing Industry's First PCI-Express SSD for Ultrabooks

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced today that it has begun mass producing the industry's first PCI-Express (PCIe) solid state drive (SSD) for next-generation ultra-slim notebook PCs.

"With the Samsung XP941, we have become the first to provide the highest performance PCIe SSD to global PC makers so that they can launch leading-edge ultra-slim notebook PCs this year," said Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics. "Samsung plans to continue timely delivery of the most advanced PCIe SSD solutions with higher density and performance, and support global IT companies providing an extremely robust computing environment to consumers." Samsung started providing the new SSD to major notebook PC makers earlier this quarter. The XP941 lineup consists of 512, 256 and 128GB SSDs.
The new Samsung XP941 delivers a level of performance that easily surpasses the speed limit of a SATA 6Gb/s interface. Samsung XP941 enables a sequential read performance of 1,400MB/s (megabytes per second), which is the highest performance available with a PCIe 2.0 interface. This allows the drive to read 500GB of data or 100 HD movies as large as 5GB (gigabytes) in only six minutes, or 10 HD movies at 5GB in 36 seconds. That is approximately seven times faster than a hard disk drive (which would need over 40 minutes for the same task), and more than 2.5 times faster than the fastest SATA SSD.

By mass producing the new PCIe SSD, Samsung has established the groundwork for a significant transition into the new paradigm in the global SSD market which enables increasing the performance and the memory storage capacity of SSDs at the same time.

The XP941 comes in the new M.2 form factor (80mm x 22mm), weighing approximately six grams - about a ninth of the 54 grams of a SATA-based 2.5 inch SSD. Also, the XP941's volume is about a seventh of that of a 2.5 inch SSD, freeing up more space for the notebook's battery and therein providing the opportunity for increased mobility that will enhance user convenience.

Samsung intends to continuously expand its production volumes of high-performance 10-nanometer class* NAND flash memory, in helping the company to maintain its lead in PCIe SSDs for ultra-slim PCs and notebook PCs. Furthermore, Samsung plans to introduce next-generation enterprise NVMe SSDs in a timely manner to also take the lead in that high-density SSD market, adding to its competitive edge.
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7 Comments on Samsung Now Mass Producing Industry's First PCI-Express SSD for Ultrabooks

#1
Jorge
This is good news and long overdue. PCIe SSDs should have been the first SSDs but better late than never. The good news is you don't need to buy an Ultra Worthless Book to get a quality PCIe SSD. All the major SSD makers will be rolling out PCIe SSDs now that the controllers and other issues have been resolved.
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#2
boogerlad
Excellent progress. I like this a lot.
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#3
TheLostSwede
News Editor
JorgeThis is good news and long overdue. PCIe SSDs should have been the first SSDs but better late than never. The good news is you don't need to buy an Ultra Worthless Book to get a quality PCIe SSD. All the major SSD makers will be rolling out PCIe SSDs now that the controllers and other issues have been resolved.
Actually, they were, but they weren't bootable so they never took off... then again, most weren't very fast either so...
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#4
Fourstaff
Sounds like they saturated PCIe 2.0, when do we get a PCIe 3.0 version? Also, if you can't boot off PCIe I wonder how you would boot the MBA. 2nd hard drive?
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#5
Aquinus
Resident Wat-man
FourstaffAlso, if you can't boot off PCIe I wonder how you would boot the MBA.
A small segment of flash memory to act as a boot loader which isn't much of a departure from what they're already doing. The MBAs already have a portion of flash that can't be touched that contains restoration utilities and such. I suspect they would have something similar to that. It's how you can image a laptop just by having an image on a network drive, it's pretty nifty.
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#6
Brusfantomet
Well, this needs a slot on desktop motherboards ASAP.
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#7
Prima.Vera
FourstaffSounds like they saturated PCIe 2.0, when do we get a PCIe 3.0 version? Also, if you can't boot off PCIe I wonder how you would boot the MBA. 2nd hard drive?
What are you talking about?? Only 1 line on PCIx 2.0 can go up to 500MB/s. 16 can go up to 8GB/s so..
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