Last week we went over the top SATA based SSD on the market, the Samsung 850 Pro. Today, we are going to take a look at the top M.2 drive on the market…which also happens to be by Samsung, the XP941! Most manufacturers have been releasing SATA based M.2 drives recently. These drives have a 6Gb/s interface limit. And while …

To anyone not familiar with SSDs, our title might not seem that striking, but it represents a huge step forward in storage technology within a very short time.  It also speaks highly of ASRock for again leading the way in advancing storage, as they are the only to incorporate a new SSD innovation into their Extreme 6 motherboard; this of …

Normally we might elect to post availability of a product, but for the number of e-mails received after our review of the Samsung XP941 PCIe X4 M.2 SSD in September of 2013. At that time, we  learned that Samsung had shut down distribution of the XP941 to all 3rd party resellers right after our report, a result of demand exceeding …

M.2 PCIe SSDs Reviews Sometimes we get fortunate enough to have just the right hardware at just the right time. Such was the case when Sony sent us their new VAIO Pro 13 Ultrabook with a Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD for review.  That SSD provided performance speeds over 1GB/s and enabled our statement of the VAIO Pro 13 as …

Our attendance at the Samsung Global SSD Summit in South Korea brought us a first glimpse of a new standard in ultrabook storage performance.  At the Summit, the Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD was displayed reaching 1GB/s transfer speeds and Apple has since released their 2013 MacBook Air which has a customized variation of the XP941; this attaining native performance of …

Sometimes small things surprise us.  Samsung just pulled this off with their newest T7 Shield which has just been released in a massive 4TB capacity.  You see… this is not typical of Samsung to push out such high capacity storage as it goes against their business model.  I know this as I had a very lengthy conversation with Samsung in …

To give you an idea how far we have come in solid-state storage, the very first notebook sold with an SSD was the Dell XPS M1330.  It shipped with the Sandisk u5000  (my first and very embarrassing review) SATA2 32GB SSD, an SSD that would gain infamy as the first ‘stuttering SSD’ and, back then, storage capacity wasn’t an option. …

The NVMe Effect. Our report today explores Samsung’s newest 950 Pro NVMe M.2 SSD. Release of this SSD will see the first retail entry of any storage medium the size of a gum stick and weighing less than 10 grams, yet capable of moving data at speeds of up to 2.5GB/s. This is unparalleled by today’s standards and is 4 …

In 2013 we were able to get a hold of Samsung’s first go at an OEM M.2 PCIe 2.0 x4 SSD, the XP941. Once word got out about this SSD’s speeds many storage enthusiasts thirsted for it. Samsung was not prepared for the consumer market to get so hyped up over it and they stopped distribution to 3rd party resellers …

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., has recently announced that it has begun mass producing a high-performance, low-powered PCIe M.2 SSD, the SM951. The OEM drive is targeted for ultra-slim notebook PCs and workstations. It is compatible with both PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 2.0 interfaces. On PCIe 2.0 sequential reads can get up to 1,600MB/s and up to 1,350MB/s for writes, around …