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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world-leading memory technology provider, is announcing mass production of its XP941 PCI-Express (PCIe) solid state drive (SSD) to be utilized in modern ultra-thin notebooks / laptops. Earlier this quarter, Samsung began supplying the new XP941 SSD to OEM notebook PC producers.
With mass production of the XP941, Samsung is establishing a basis for a significant paradigm shift in world SSD markets. Utilizing the extra bandwidth of a PCIe interface and Samsung’s latest 10-mm class NAND flash memory enables increased performance and increased storage capacity at the same time.
The XP941 is made in the new M.2 form factor (80mm X 20mm). Compared to a standard 2.5″ form factor SSD, the XP941 is about one ninth the weight at a mere 6 grams; and occupies about one seventh of the volume of the 2.5″ SSD. This frees up oh-so-rare real estate in notebooks, allowing that space to be allocated to a larger battery. Battery life is as important as performance in Ultrabook-style devices.
According to Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics, “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. 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’s XP941 achieves performance that would easily saturate a SATA 6GB/s interface. At sequential reads of 1400 MB/s, this is nearly 2.5 times faster than the fastest single SATA SSD. To put this into real life terms, the XP941 can read 100 HD movies up to 5GB each in a mere six minutes; or 10 HD movies up to 5GB each in 36 seconds. The XP941 is available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities.
Samsung has stated that they also plan to introduce a next-generation enterprise NVMe SSD, which would allow them to move ahead of the pack in that high-density SSD market also. The Samsung XP941 PCIe SSD press release can be viewed here.