Samsung XP941 M.2 SSD Shows Up at Retailers

[btarunr]

At Computex 2014, we're expecting the proverbial Noah's Flood of new SSDs in the M.2 form-factor, which overcome the bandwidth limitation of SATA 6 Gb/s, and aren't as messy when installed as SATA-Express. The first generation of M.2, at its physical layer, is PCI-Express 2.0 x2, with a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 1000 MB/s per direction. Among the first such drives is the XP941 from Samsung. The drive went into mass production way back in June 2013, but it's only now hitting the stores, as the first motherboards with M.2 slots launched, with the advent of Intel's 9-series chipset.

What sets this drive apart from conventional M.2 drives is it follows a draft specification that mandates PCI-Express 2.0 x4 interface. When installed on slots with x4 wiring, the drive offers sequential read speeds of up to 1,170 MB/s, and up to 930 MB/s maximum writes. It also offers 4K random read performance of up to 122,000 IOPS, and 4K random write performance of up to 72,000 IOPS. The only 9-series motherboard with such a slot is the Z97 Extreme6 by ASRock. You could also try using PCI-Express 2.0 x4 add-on cards such as the one Plextor's M6e comes with. The 512 GB variant of the drive is priced at 79,800 JPY including local taxes (US $780).



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[Prima.Vera]

Does it support TRIM, Garbage Colection, OS Boot (fast boot, not 5 minutes like those OCZ craps) ?

 

[natr0n]

costs around $5 to make yet sells for $780

 

[zinfinion]

Care to share which retailers? I see one listing from a 3rd party on Amazon for $750 for the 512GB and listings for all 3 capacities on ramcity.com.au, $674.99 AUD for the 512GB, so minus the 10% GST and converting to USD, $574.48 before any shipping and customs fees.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JOSM3TK/
https://www.ramcity.com.au/upgrade/data-storage/internal-solid-state-drives/samsung-xp941/81068

Edit: Oh, the source article is from Japan, so clearly Japanese retailers. Not really helpful on the other side of the planet... Seeing it at retail anywhere though is a good thing I suppose.

 

[btarunr]

Does it support TRIM, Garbage Colection, OS Boot (fast boot, not 5 minutes like those OCZ craps) ?

Yes, yes, and all motherboards with M.2 can boot from any M.2 SSD. Since no there are no motherboards with M.2 that run legacy BIOS, all M.2 drives have an industry-standard EFI module that can interface with the UEFI in milliseconds.

 

[Octavean]

costs around $5 to make yet sells for $780

Speed, performance and powerful hardware in general tends to cost in excess.

I'm just glad its here. Such things will become cheaper over time anyway. Just be glad the retailers are not jacking up the price to ~$1000+ USD and more.

 

[douglatins]

costs around $5 to make yet sells for $780

my thoughs exactly

 

[radrok]

Random 4K performance is still meh.

Sequential Write/Read is not that useful unless you transfer a lot of data between SSDs and that's where this thing shines.

 

[Disparia]

This one in particular is up there in price because it's 4-lane controller.

The Crucial M550 2.5", M.2, and mSATA are all within $10 of each other at a given size. Though, the M.2 model is using a SATA controller like the others. Hopefully the buttload of PCIe-based M.2 products said to be coming soon will keep prices under control.

 

[xBruce88x]

this is pretty sweet news indeed, (m.2 in general i mean). I hope it drives the cost of "conventional" SSDs even lower. would love to be able to afford at least 1TB of SSD and then a smaller M.2 (32-64gb) for my OS sometime this year... and of course a normal HDD for things that don't really need the speed (music, documents, .zip archives, etc)

 

[acekombatkiwi1]

Just ran crystal disk on my 3x Samsung 830 128GB SSD RAID 0 setup and it beat me at everything except Sequential reads and writes, so it performs really well considering its size. I want one.

 

[AsRock]

costs around $5 to make yet sells for $780

$5 to make maybe so but what about all the other costs they have to recoup, they are a company and require a profit for the next best thing like every other company..

And as seen as shit goes out of date over a month or so they gotta make as much as possible.

 

[RamCity]

Care to share which retailers? I see one listing from a 3rd party on Amazon for $750 for the 512GB and listings for all 3 capacities on ramcity.com.au, $674.99 AUD for the 512GB, so minus the 10% GST and converting to USD, $574.48 before any shipping and customs fees.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JOSM3TK/
https://www.ramcity.com.au/upgrade/data-storage/internal-solid-state-drives/samsung-xp941/81068

Edit: Oh, the source article is from Japan, so clearly Japanese retailers. Not really helpful on the other side of the planet... Seeing it at retail anywhere though is a good thing I suppose.

Thanks to some generous trade agreements between the US and Australia, if you are importing into the States from Australia for personal use then no import duties apply. If importing for commercial reasons (i.e. for resale), then the duty-free limit is up to $2,500USD.

We've exported a lot of XP941's to the US and so far no complaints about duties. You can read more about it here: http://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-import-export/internet-purchases

 

[xBruce88x]

Nice to see your actively checking forums like these to address the concerns of your customers.

 

[RamCity]

Nice to see your actively checking forums like these to address the concerns of your customers.

Thanks! Google alerts - my greatest time management tool ;-)