Samsung Displays Series 9 UltraBook Containing 1GB/s Speed PCIe M.2 SSD – Pepcom Las Vegas 2014 Update

I had almost thought I might never see it and truly can’t stand by what might happen down the road, but Samsung had their ‘pre-production’ Series 9 ultrabook on display at Pepcom with it’s own Samsung XP941 PCIe M.2 SSD, performing at 1GB/s.  To those not familiar with Samsung, they value their business relationships dearly and the XP941 PCIe SSD (actually a custom derivative thereof) has been present in the new MBA and we also saw it most recently in the new Sony VAIO ultrabook.  We haven’t seen it anywhere near Samsung’s own ultrabook at all and, considering that the Series 9 has the ability to be one of the worlds top ultras, many found this rather surprising.

For those not into the storage scene, the importance of this SSD, in a PCIe M.2 form factor, cannot be understated as it can triple the performance of previous gen SSD laptops with respect to data transfer, this meaning faster media transfers, application loading and so on. It is like comparing a Mustang to Maserati.  We have looked at M.2 SSDs extensively and its coverage can be seen here.  Here is a shot confirming the Samsung XP941 PCIe M.2  SSD in the Device Manager:

In any case, gaining the opportunity to get our ‘benchmark enabled flash drive’ in the Series 9 was not the easiest ordeal as well, and mandated some clever diversion on our part to get our friends at Samsung looking the other way for just a moment while we tested.  This ATTO demonstrates the performance that we should have been seeing some time ago in this ultra, albeit the complete result is not as solid as we would like when considering file size performance graduation.  This is only expected from a pre-configured pre-production system, hence the reason getting this test conducted was a bit difficult.

Now….having provided this information, we need to reiterate that this is a pre-production model and that we cannot vouch for what we will see when supply is available, however we will revisit to confirm.  As many followers of our website know, we discovered a rather unfortunate situation where Sony was pulling a ‘bait and switch’ in their production line which resulted in some serious consumer complaints.  In their order process, anyone ordering standard configurations would receive a SATA M.2 SSD, rather than a PCIe SSD, resulting in very disappointing speeds of just over 500MB/s, rather than 1.2GB/s.  Our testing of both the SATA and PCIe M.2 configured VAIO ultrabook can be found here.

In the end, kudos to Samsung though…can’t wait to get one in our hands for testing!  Apologies as well for the condition of the shots but, as we can tell, the S9 is still a fingerprint magnet.