Samsung Mass Produces First PCIe SSDs For Ultrabooks

Ultrabooks have almost made exclusive use of SSDs since their release because they are quieter, thinner, faster and more power efficient than mechanical hard drives whilst the extra price premium they have is more acceptable given the target market of Ultrabooks. Samsung have just announced that they have made quite an innovation in moving the Ultrabook SSD market forward with their new PCI express SSDs for ultrabooks.

These are made in the M.2 form factor, that is measuring in at 80mm x 22mm / 3.14 x 0.86 inches, and weigh a tiny 6 grams! That compares to the 54 grams of a SATA 2.5″ SSD. Brilliantly there is absolutely no performance hit as these Samsung XP941 drives can read at 1400 MB/s aka 1.4GB/s which is about 2.75 times as fast as current desktop class SATA III drives. If anything, these drives are “limited”, and we use that term very loosely, by the PCI Express Gen 2 interface they use.

“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 has been shipping the XP941 PCIe SSDs to ultrabook vendors since early in the second quarter and they are available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities using 10nm NAND flash. Expect products using these SSDs to be available later on this year in Q4.

Image courtesy of Samsung